I spoke with a representative of O’Reilly at the FOSDEM conference. Although ORA had no books on games at the time, they were (and are) the biggest name in the field, and a guarantee of kudos points should they want to move into the computer games arena. The guy from ORA seemed interested in my ideas and was influenced by the passion and interest I showed (both genuine, incidentally!) so I followed it up with a couple of emails, and within a month I was assigned an editor with whom to work.
Things went well with ORA. We discussed two different titles. The first, “Data-Driven Development” had its roots in an idea from my editor at ORA, and an article I’d written for Linux Magazine the year before. The second was my original pitch, entitled “Cross Platform Games.” Ultimately, we settled on the cross-platform titled because the book had a more obvious cohesion.
Late in 2003, my full-time job disappeared as the company for which I was working went under. With a little backup cash behind me, I gave myself six months to see if I could make the book happen.
O’Reilly and I had discussed terms, agreed on a dollar amount for the book, and by the 20th January 2004 I had completed the first chapter (Chapter 2, incidentally) in docbook format and had a detailed plan for all the rest.
This is where the first problem occurred.