Fun Factory: An Insider's Guide on the Video Game Industry

Fun Factory: An Insider's Guide on the Video Game Industry is an eye-opening grand tour answering the questions "How do video games actually get made?" and "What's it actually like to work on a title?". What happens when you put fifty plus creative people in a room, most under twenty-five years old, and throw millions of dollars at them? Tales of axe-wielding programmers, studded leather underwear wearing artists, millions of dollars spent and lost, and the birth, life, and death of a development studio are used as insights into the video games industry. Using titles and franchises such as Baldur's Gate, Call of Duty, Crysis, Quake, and many others as examples, Fun Factory entertains by walking through the entire creative process of how games are made from the initial concept to the final shipped title. Ben Smedstad has over 22 years of experience and worked on 20+ games, as both a publisher and developer. He exposes the reality of making games using personal behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the biggest franchises in the industry. Ben shows the interplay between creativity, tech, and even the accidents and borderline madness that result in the games you love to play.