Serializing STAY AWHILE AND LISTEN: The How
Yesterday, I sat you down and had a writer-to-reader chat with you about why I carved Stay Awhile and Listen (SAAL) into three delicious servings, the first of which launches on 10/31. Today, I'd like to explain how I carved it up so you know exactly what each serving of SAAL will get you. I also show off SAAL 1's table of contents and explain how you'll access the bonus content in each book.
All settled in? Got your coffee and a snack? (I'm a hot coca man, myself.) Here we go.
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As I told you, it was my wife's idea to serialize SAAL. I ignored her words of wisdom twice out of some desire to keep SAAL whole. Third time's the charm. Declaring Amie a genius (and ignoring her cries of "BUT I SUGGESTED THIS MONTHS AGO WHY DON'T YOU EVER LISTEN TO ME AAARRRGGHHH"), I put SAAL under the knife. Here's how the trio turned out.
- Book 1 begins with the origins of the two Blizzards, goes through the making of Diablo and the first two WarCraft games, and concludes the moment Blizzard North finishes the first Diablo.
- Book 2 goes through Diablo 2, StarCraft, Blizzard North's heaps of unfinished games, the beginning of World of WarCraft, and culminates in the event that tore Blizzard North up from its roots and left the company forever changed.
- Book 3 explores Blizzard North's final two years, the release of "WoW," the Diablo 3 that Blizzard Entertainment made and released on May 15, 2012, and extends through early 2013 to chronicle the dramatic changes Blizzard made to Diablo 3 during its first 9 to 10 months of its life.
The short of this is, you will get much more content from three books than I could have packed into one. Don't believe me? Check out the Table of Contents from Book 1:
Prologue: The Corpse Run - 8
Chapter 1: Silicon and String Bikinis - 15
Chapter 2: Desktop Heroes - 28
Chapter 3: Project Condor - 41
Chapter 4: Superman Can't Kick - 53
Chapter 5: The Business Plan Du Jour - 73
Chapter 6: The World of WarCraft - 90
Chapter 7: The Game We'll Make Someday - 111
Chapter 8: The Velvet Hammer - 125
Chapter 9: The Condor Test - 147
Chapter 10: Spit, Bubblegum, and Floppy Disks - 167
Chapter 11: Light and Dark - 189
Chapter 12: Battles and Battle.net - 207
Chapter 13: The Golden Times - 221
Epilogue: Phenomenon - 245
Side Quests: Chapter 1 - 246
Side Quests: Chapter 2 - 249
Side Quests: Chapter 3 - 253
Side Quests: Chapter 4 - 256
Side Quests: Chapter 5 - 257
Side Quests: Chapter 6 - 263
Side Quests: Chapter 7 - 274
Side Quests: Chapter 8 - 276
Side Quests: Chapter 9 - 280
Side Quests: Chapter 10 - 291
Side Quests: Chapter 11 - 296
Side Quests: Chapter 12 - 307
Side Quests: Chapter 13 - 310
Bonus Round 1: Condor's Lost Games - 321
Bonus Round 2: "Rock Balls" - The Making of WarCraft II - 325
Bonus Round 3: Cartridge Chronicles - 340
Bonus Round 4: Interview with Brian Fargo, Founder of Interplay Productions, Inc. - 348
Bonus Round 5: Interview with Feargus Urquhart, Producer at Interplay Productions - 354
Bonus Round 6: Interview with Scott Coleman and Jay Cotton, Creators of Kali - 360
Bonus Round 7: Interview with Efraim Wyeth and Mike Sigal, Founders of FM Waves - 370
Bear in mind that this TOC reflects a double-spaced Microsoft Word document. On an iPad-sized screen, SAAL #1 weighs in at closer to 500 pages.
But you're not interested in the page count, are you? You're salivating over all that juicy bonus content. Allow me to explain how those "Side Quests" and "Bonus Rounds" work.
When I was a kid, I read choose-your-own-adventure novels. What I enjoyed most about those books was that they weren't meant to be read from beginning to end, A to Z. At certain junctures, readers were put in a predicament and told to make a choice: turn to page X if you want to do this, or page Y if you want to do that.
I loved the interactivity of the format. It felt like... well, it felt like a video game. Armed with a buckets and buckets of cool stories and information I'd gotten out of my interviews, I decided to apply the choose-your-own-adventure format to SAAL's bonus material. Here's how it works, straight from an author's note at the beginning of SAAL #1.
--------------------------------------------------------
I accumulated a dragon's horde of material over five years of research and interviews forStay Awhile and Listen. So much material, in fact, that I risked cramming chapters so full of information that they became weighty and tangential. Rather than stuff each chapter to excess, I spread content across three sections: the main book, Side Quests, and Bonus Rounds.
Main Book
The meat and potatoes of Stay Awhile and Listen consists of an introduction, thirteen chapters, and an epilogue. You can skip the Side Quests and Bonus Rounds if you like, but you'll miss out on lots of behind-the-scenes stories and information if you do.
Side Quests
Side Quests collect supplementary material. As you read, you'll come across "[SQ]" markers. Touch a marker and you'll jump to an anecdote or bit of history relevant to the passage you just read in the main book. From there, tap "[Return to Chapter]" to zip right back to where you left off. Or, if you like, you can save the Side Quests for after you've finished the main book.
Side Quests come in seven varieties:
- Level 1: Game developers relate how they went from playing games to making games for a living. Readers who aspire to do the same should take these stories to heart.
- Byte-Sized History: Anecdotes from developers and historical overviews of studios, game hardware, and important figures in the games industry.
- Game Design 101: Lessons concerning play testing, storytelling, difficulty, pacing, how visuals and music enhance gameplay, and other areas of game design.
- Behind the Code: A peek behind the curtain to learn technical details such as implementing features in a game's code and creating art for characters and game levels.
- Cutting Room Floor: Game content that was conceptualized or developed, but left unused.
- Sanctuary Speaks: We asked various online communities to submit their most memorable anecdotes related to games covered in Stay Awhile and Listen. Sanctuary Speaks (Sanctuary being the world where Diablo unfolds) shares those stories.
- Author's Note: An introduction or explanation that provides a frame of reference for the content that follows the note.
Bonus Rounds
Bonus Rounds are extra chapters that expand on people, events, and games covered in the main book. You can read the Bonus Rounds whenever you choose, in any order you choose, but they are best absorbed after finishing the main book.
--------------------------------------------------------
If you've made it thus far: thank you for reading. I promise you, SAAL's individual pieces amount to so much more than a sum of its parts. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more SAAL-related news, including pre-order information when it becomes available.
All settled in? Got your coffee and a snack? (I'm a hot coca man, myself.) Here we go.
---
As I told you, it was my wife's idea to serialize SAAL. I ignored her words of wisdom twice out of some desire to keep SAAL whole. Third time's the charm. Declaring Amie a genius (and ignoring her cries of "BUT I SUGGESTED THIS MONTHS AGO WHY DON'T YOU EVER LISTEN TO ME AAARRRGGHHH"), I put SAAL under the knife. Here's how the trio turned out.
- Book 1 begins with the origins of the two Blizzards, goes through the making of Diablo and the first two WarCraft games, and concludes the moment Blizzard North finishes the first Diablo.
- Book 2 goes through Diablo 2, StarCraft, Blizzard North's heaps of unfinished games, the beginning of World of WarCraft, and culminates in the event that tore Blizzard North up from its roots and left the company forever changed.
- Book 3 explores Blizzard North's final two years, the release of "WoW," the Diablo 3 that Blizzard Entertainment made and released on May 15, 2012, and extends through early 2013 to chronicle the dramatic changes Blizzard made to Diablo 3 during its first 9 to 10 months of its life.
The short of this is, you will get much more content from three books than I could have packed into one. Don't believe me? Check out the Table of Contents from Book 1:
Prologue: The Corpse Run - 8
Chapter 1: Silicon and String Bikinis - 15
Chapter 2: Desktop Heroes - 28
Chapter 3: Project Condor - 41
Chapter 4: Superman Can't Kick - 53
Chapter 5: The Business Plan Du Jour - 73
Chapter 6: The World of WarCraft - 90
Chapter 7: The Game We'll Make Someday - 111
Chapter 8: The Velvet Hammer - 125
Chapter 9: The Condor Test - 147
Chapter 10: Spit, Bubblegum, and Floppy Disks - 167
Chapter 11: Light and Dark - 189
Chapter 12: Battles and Battle.net - 207
Chapter 13: The Golden Times - 221
Epilogue: Phenomenon - 245
Side Quests: Chapter 1 - 246
Side Quests: Chapter 2 - 249
Side Quests: Chapter 3 - 253
Side Quests: Chapter 4 - 256
Side Quests: Chapter 5 - 257
Side Quests: Chapter 6 - 263
Side Quests: Chapter 7 - 274
Side Quests: Chapter 8 - 276
Side Quests: Chapter 9 - 280
Side Quests: Chapter 10 - 291
Side Quests: Chapter 11 - 296
Side Quests: Chapter 12 - 307
Side Quests: Chapter 13 - 310
Bonus Round 1: Condor's Lost Games - 321
Bonus Round 2: "Rock Balls" - The Making of WarCraft II - 325
Bonus Round 3: Cartridge Chronicles - 340
Bonus Round 4: Interview with Brian Fargo, Founder of Interplay Productions, Inc. - 348
Bonus Round 5: Interview with Feargus Urquhart, Producer at Interplay Productions - 354
Bonus Round 6: Interview with Scott Coleman and Jay Cotton, Creators of Kali - 360
Bonus Round 7: Interview with Efraim Wyeth and Mike Sigal, Founders of FM Waves - 370
Bear in mind that this TOC reflects a double-spaced Microsoft Word document. On an iPad-sized screen, SAAL #1 weighs in at closer to 500 pages.
But you're not interested in the page count, are you? You're salivating over all that juicy bonus content. Allow me to explain how those "Side Quests" and "Bonus Rounds" work.
When I was a kid, I read choose-your-own-adventure novels. What I enjoyed most about those books was that they weren't meant to be read from beginning to end, A to Z. At certain junctures, readers were put in a predicament and told to make a choice: turn to page X if you want to do this, or page Y if you want to do that.
I loved the interactivity of the format. It felt like... well, it felt like a video game. Armed with a buckets and buckets of cool stories and information I'd gotten out of my interviews, I decided to apply the choose-your-own-adventure format to SAAL's bonus material. Here's how it works, straight from an author's note at the beginning of SAAL #1.
--------------------------------------------------------
I accumulated a dragon's horde of material over five years of research and interviews forStay Awhile and Listen. So much material, in fact, that I risked cramming chapters so full of information that they became weighty and tangential. Rather than stuff each chapter to excess, I spread content across three sections: the main book, Side Quests, and Bonus Rounds.
Main Book
The meat and potatoes of Stay Awhile and Listen consists of an introduction, thirteen chapters, and an epilogue. You can skip the Side Quests and Bonus Rounds if you like, but you'll miss out on lots of behind-the-scenes stories and information if you do.
Side Quests
Side Quests collect supplementary material. As you read, you'll come across "[SQ]" markers. Touch a marker and you'll jump to an anecdote or bit of history relevant to the passage you just read in the main book. From there, tap "[Return to Chapter]" to zip right back to where you left off. Or, if you like, you can save the Side Quests for after you've finished the main book.
Side Quests come in seven varieties:
- Level 1: Game developers relate how they went from playing games to making games for a living. Readers who aspire to do the same should take these stories to heart.
- Byte-Sized History: Anecdotes from developers and historical overviews of studios, game hardware, and important figures in the games industry.
- Game Design 101: Lessons concerning play testing, storytelling, difficulty, pacing, how visuals and music enhance gameplay, and other areas of game design.
- Behind the Code: A peek behind the curtain to learn technical details such as implementing features in a game's code and creating art for characters and game levels.
- Cutting Room Floor: Game content that was conceptualized or developed, but left unused.
- Sanctuary Speaks: We asked various online communities to submit their most memorable anecdotes related to games covered in Stay Awhile and Listen. Sanctuary Speaks (Sanctuary being the world where Diablo unfolds) shares those stories.
- Author's Note: An introduction or explanation that provides a frame of reference for the content that follows the note.
Bonus Rounds
Bonus Rounds are extra chapters that expand on people, events, and games covered in the main book. You can read the Bonus Rounds whenever you choose, in any order you choose, but they are best absorbed after finishing the main book.
--------------------------------------------------------
If you've made it thus far: thank you for reading. I promise you, SAAL's individual pieces amount to so much more than a sum of its parts. Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more SAAL-related news, including pre-order information when it becomes available.