The Spelunky book is finally here, weighing in at 222 pages! It’s available both as a physical book (which looks very nice - the editors and printers did a great job), and as an eBook.
It’s been a long road - I appreciate the patience of all the backers and my editor, Gabe Durham. Before this, I’d never written anything longer than what I ended up cutting from my first draft (about 10,000 words). So thanks for bearing with me!
I’m happy with the final book. There was a lot I wanted to say - about game design, about the craft of game-making, and about my influences - that had to be tied together through the story of Spelunky’s development. You’d think that since I created the game all the thoughts I needed would already be in my head, but I rarely have a full understanding of my own work at the time of its release (this is something I discuss in the book itself). To put together the entire picture, I revisited my old emails, chats, and forum posts, and also read other people’s thoughts on the game.
The result is that I learned a lot about Spelunky and my feelings about game design and creativity after writing this book. Hopefully readers will get the same kind of satisfaction from it. At the very least, it should give you a sense of what it was like to make a good-sized indie game, from the freeware version on the TIGSource forums to the Xbox 360 remake and beyond.
Thanks again to the backers, to Boss Fight Books, and to the many people who read the book and gave feedback. Look for excerpts of the book to be released in the coming days!
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