The making of Diablo

I ended up listening to two audiobooks that the describe the creation of the first two Diablo video games. I played this game a whole bunch as a teenager, so it was interesting to hear about the development process. It was a fun read, partially because it helped confirm that video game development is not for me. While is sure sounds like fun in the beginning, there are just too many stories from developers that have been burned out by the process. Many years of crunch time has been the norm for these games, and it caused a lot of stress ... and divources.

Still there are two anekdotes worth highlighting in particular.

• When you encounter a group of enemies, lets say skeletons, in these video games you sometimes can spot a leader in the group. This creature would look the same as the rest, but it would have higher stats and a different color. I had always had the idea that this was there to indicate that this monster had a special attack or something. But it turns out that this was a trick to deal with the memory constraints of the game. Each level could only store four monster sprites per level. If a level had a boss monster, that meant that there could only be three other monsters on the level. So the developers came up with the idea to just make these mini boss monsters look like the other monsters, but with a different color. This could still make it feel like you were fighting a tougher, different monster, without having to store a new sprite in memory.
• When you switch levels the music changes. A basement dungeon should have a different tune than the forst surface above it. But this brings in a new problem: how do you deal with the transition? After all, different styles of music don't automatically mix. The trick was to have every track of background music start with just percussion. This way, if a transition needs to happen, you don't have to worry about scales or notes and you could just blend the tracks when the character changed levels.

There are a lot of other anekdotes in the book that paint a clear picture of the games industry. It is worth a read if you're interested in the topic but I can imagine the book is much more interesting if you played these games at length when you were younger.