It Just Keeps Coming

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Paizo is a very busy place. For any given month we're publishing six or more books, plus novels, item cards, and maps. I feel like those vaudeville acts where the guy's spinning plates on top of poles, keeping them all balanced.

I love it. I love being busy—I'd rather be busy than bored. Since I started at Paizo in July, I've developed at least 12 different products. And that doesn't count planning for future products (like the Pathfinder RPG) or giving feedback on other peoples' projects. Sure, sometimes we get behind, but I often say, "Nothing makes a person more productive than the last minute," and we buckle down and work that much faster.

This very day I'm helping finish up Osirion, Land of Pharaohs and Pathfinder Chronicles Guide to Absalom, doing back cover copy for an as-yet-unannounced surprise, starting a development pass on Dragons Revisited, doing a quick development pass on Pathfinder Society scenario #7, doing a pagination for Clash of the Kingslayers, writing an art order for Guide to Katapesh, and reviewing sketches for the next item cards set. Phew! It's fast-paced and crazy, but it is very satisfying when the books arrive in the warehouse and I know that our team worked really hard to get them done. And this is a fairly typical day. I checked our schedule page for October and of this month's releases, I developed or helped develop four of them and wrote another. You may think that working for a game company is nothing but sitting around, rolling dice, and eating pizza, but it's actually a lot of intense crunch-time labor.

One of the editors of Dragon back in the '80s or '90s wrote an editorial about the monthly magazine business, and how you're always counting down toward the issue's deadline. The first day of working on a magazine is Deadline Minus 30, the next is Deadline Minus 29, and so on. And the day after you ship the book isn't Deadline Plus One—it's Deadline Minus 30 for the next issue. It never stops! You always have something to work on.

Speaking of which, I have three more things I need to finish before the end of the day. Time for some caffeine fuel! And maybe some delicious pie....

Sean K Reynolds
Developer