The World of Warcraft Diary offers a rare, unfiltered look inside the gaming industry. It was written by the game's first-level designer, John Staats, from notes he took during WoW's creation. The WoW Diary explains why developers do things and debunks popular myths about the games industry. In great detail he covers what it took to finish the project; the surprises, the arguments, the mistakes, and Blizzard's formula for success. The author includes anecdotes about the industry, the company, the dev team; how they worked together, and the philosophy behind their decisions.
The WoW Diary is a story made from notes taken during the dev team’s four-year journey. It is a timeline of Vanilla WoW’s development cycle, a time capsule with an exhausting amount of details that also looks at the anatomy of a computer game studio. In order to illustrate how all the parts of computer game company work together, he interviewed everyone from the company’s founders to his former teammates; and the supporting departments who helped make WoW a reality.
The Post-Mortem companion book contains 70 pages about WoW’s post-launch woes and triumphs. The new material covers philosophies John Staats learned at Blizzard that didn’t belong in the original book. The new articles include advice to aspiring developers and thoughts about success in the entertainment industry.
The WoW Diary, Post-Mortem Booklet Table of Contents: Bones to Pick | Scholomance Of Axes and Arrows | Making Warsong Pushing Polys | My Vanilla WoW Dungeons Four Developers | How The WoW Diary Happened The Benefits of Self-Publishing The Secret Sauce Career Advice for New Developers The Wasteland of Success
