Small Teams, Whole Worlds: What five game studios built, what it cost them, and what a founder can borrow - Couverture souple

McDuffey, Ty

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798161668221

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

Naughty Dog's 2001 game budget passed $15 million, says co-founder Andy Gavin. This book shows founders what five game studios built and what it cost.

Each chapter ends with a move to test against your own work and a bill to weigh against it.

Naughty Dog's Andy Gavin says he chose to write Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy in a language of his own design, and Stephen White says its compiler took more than a year.

Game Freak, maker of Pokemon Emerald, took short jobs for other companies while the first Pokemon games were unfinished, and TIME reported in 1999 that it nearly went broke in those years.

Akihiro Hino says Level-5's staff gave up their year-end holidays for about two weeks on a prototype, and Yuji Horii says he decided to ask Level-5 to develop Dragon Quest VIII after seeing it.

Square's Tetsuya Nomura says he asked for the job on Kingdom Hearts, and told Variety in 2018 that a later game's plot took over a year to get approved.

Marvelous Interactive's Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life chapter turns to the first Harvest Moon, from 1996, where Yasuhiro Wada says he was ready to quit because he saw no way to finish within the remaining budget.

Each chapter has a story, its moves, a warning label that names the cost, a box with four checkboxes and a Your turn page with ruled lines. Chapter 6 puts the costs in one table and ends with a twenty-line checklist.

It is written builder to builder for solo founders and people who run small teams.

Read what each studio paid, then decide which moves are worth it to you.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798161668221
• Reliure: Taschenbuch
• Nombre de pages: 112
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.de/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg