Turning Your Book, Film, or Brand Character Into a Game: What to Prepare and What to Expect

Almost always, yes, in some form. Quiet, character-driven stories can work too, as can puzzle, cozy, or narrative games, not only action ones. If you’re wondering how to turn a book into a video game, the real question is whether yours passes three tests.

1. There’s something for the player to do. A plot isn’t a game. A player needs an action they’re happy to repeat, whether that’s racing, collecting, solving, building, or fighting.
2. You can legally do it. Someone has to hold the game rights, and it has to be you or someone who has agreed to the project. We cover that in the rights section below.
3. The size fits the budget. An open-world adaptation and a short mobile game can both be “a game based on my story,” and they sit in very different budget ranges.

When one of those isn’t in place yet, the answer is usually “not yet” rather than “no.” A story with no obvious activity needs a design pass to find one. Unclear rights get sorted before work starts. A big idea on a small budget can usually start as a smaller first version.

Characters follow the same logic. If you’re asking how to create a game from a fictional character, a mascot, or a cartoon with a clear personality, a look people recognize, and one simple activity to build around, it is often an easier starting point than a full story. The sections below take these in order: what the player does and which game type fits, then rights and approvals, then size and cost.

Whether you’re working out how to turn a book into a game or a film into one, the answer depends less on the genre you like and more on three things: how fans already meet your world, when the game has to ship, and how long you want people to keep playing. That’s the first conversation we have with anyone who arrives with a story and no game design.

Read about each of these projects in the section on games we’ve built from existing IP.

The first design job is turning your world into a loop: the main thing the player does again and again. In a book-to-game adaptation, a novel can spend a chapter on a quiet conversation, but a player needs something to do in the tenth hour as well as the first. Ask for a big open world, and the map alone can change the budget more than almost any other choice.

If the game is aimed at children under 13 in the US, the federal kids’ privacy rule (COPPA) affects what the game can collect, so mention the age group on the first call. The FTC’s updated rule has applied in full since April 22, 2026 (a few provisions have different dates), and it requires separate parental consent before children’s data is shared with third parties for targeted ads. That matters most for mascot games with ads or sponsor tie-ins.

A short brief, your reference material, one person who can approve things, and a plan for how the game makes money and who publishes it. You don’t need a finished game design, but the more of these you have, the fewer weeks go on guessing.

1. The world in a few pages: characters, places, tone, and what must never appear in the game. Studios call this a world bible or a style guide if it covers the look.
2. Character sheets showing each main character from the front, side, and back, plus a color palette. Artists build 3D models from these.
3. A line or two on what the player does: fight, explore, collect, race, build, solve.
4. Where it will be played and by whom: phone, PC, console, or Roblox, and the age range.
5. The paperwork showing you hold the rights to the story, the characters, any music, and anyone’s voice or likeness.
6. One approver who can say yes or no within a couple of days.
7. How the game should make money: a free promo game, a paid game, or one with ads or in-app purchases.
8. Who will publish it, and whose App Store, Google Play or Steam account it goes on.
9. A few games like the one you want to build, and a few you don’t want yours to resemble. Both lists tell us more about the feel you’re after than a long description would.

If you don’t have art yet, start with the look before anyone models anything. Our guide to locking a visual style before production explains how.

The copyright owner, or someone they’ve given the exclusive rights to, decides whether a game based on the work can be made. The U.S. Copyright Office is clear that only the owner can make or authorize an adaptation of a work, and that making one without authorization may be infringement. A game based on your book, film, or character is an adaptation too, so the same logic applies.

In practice, it breaks down like this:

If you wrote and published the book yourself, check any publishing or distribution agreement for who holds media and game rights. If a studio, network, or publisher holds the rights to your film or show, it will probably also decide about the game. Either way, a studio will ask to see the paper: the clause in your publishing contract that covers games, or a short license letter from the rights holder that does.

Characters you don’t own are a different case. Being inspired by a style or genre is fine. Using someone else’s characters, names or world, such as a famous anime’s, a toy brand’s or a Disney film’s, needs that owner’s license, and we can’t build it without one.

Music and an actor’s voice or likeness can need separate agreements, which is worth sorting out early if the game uses either (our Munna Michael runner, for example, has a lead character modeled on the film’s actor, and that kind of likeness is worth getting agreed upon in writing).

Names need a separate look. Copyright protects the creative work, not names, titles, or slogans, which can often be protected as trademarks instead. If your character’s name or logo matters to the brand, ask a trademark lawyer before launch.

We’re not lawyers, and we don’t negotiate rights for you. What we can do is start work once you tell us what you hold and ask the right questions early. When the IP belongs to someone else, such as a studio or a licensor, expect them to review the game as it’s built.

By agreeing to the reference material first and putting a review step between every new asset and the game. That’s how we worked on School of Dragons: every new asset was checked against DreamWorks’ style guides, character references, and lore documentation and had to pass franchise approval before it went in.

On Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed, we kept the art consistent by studying the reference material, following approved style guides and holding regular art direction syncs with the client studio.

On Munna Michael: Dance & Run, our team studied the film’s trailers and clips to build the lead actor’s dance moves, and the game’s soundtrack uses original songs from the film.

Ask any team how approvals work and how long a review round takes, because those days add up across a whole game. And if you’re the IP owner, you keep creative control. As our School of Dragons case study puts it, working with a partner gives you extra people on the project while you keep the creative say.

Four projects show the range, from a fixed-date film game to an online world that keeps growing.

School of Dragons

School of Dragons is a mobile MMORPG (a massive online role-playing game) set in DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon world, built in Unity for iOS and Android. We worked on it as a co-development and LiveOps partner. LiveOps covers the events, rewards, and updates that keep players coming back. Our School of Dragons case study covers the build, and our LiveOps write-up reports 30M+ registered players worldwide and Top-20 free app and Top-10 free game rankings on mobile.

Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed

A 4v1 asymmetrical multiplayer game (four players hunt, one plays the ghost) built on Unreal Engine 4 for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. We co-developed it with the client studio. Here’s the Ghostbusters case study.

The Hobbit

A 3D RPG combat game for iOS and Android, released to coincide with Warner Bros’ The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies. Players pick one of four races (Humans, Dwarves, Elves, or Orcs), each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and a global leaderboard ranks battle results. A film-to-video game adaptation like this has a fixed release date, so the useful question is what a small, polished game can do before opening night. See the Hobbit portfolio page.

Nickverse

A Nickelodeon world inside Roblox, where fans can visit places like the Krusty Krab, meet characters such as SpongeBob SquarePants, and decorate their own spaces. It shows how a character-led brand can live in a platform where its audience already plays. More on the Nickverse portfolio page.

Smaller projects include Munna Michael: Dance & Run, an endless runner made to promote a Bollywood film, which Google Play featured in the first week of its 2017 release; Kidd Keo: Back to Newport, a mobile game based on a hit music album; Hello Kitty Orchard, a 2D arcade game; and Chhota Bheem: Up the Hill. More are in our promotional games portfolio.

Two projects that both say “game based on my story” can differ in budget by a factor of ten. Six things explain most of that gap, and most of them are decisions you can make before the first call.

• How much of the world players can explore. One arena, a handful of levels, or an open map are three very different amounts of art, level design, and testing.
• Platforms. Our indie game development cost guide puts a PC version at roughly 10 to 20 percent above a mobile build, console at 30 to 50 percent above, and a cross-platform release at 40 to 70 percent above.
• Online or offline. Multiplayer needs servers, matchmaking, and anti-cheat, so it sits in a higher range than a single-player game of the same look.
• Number of characters, places, and items. In an IP game each one is built to your reference material and goes through your approval, so a bigger cast means more review rounds as well as more art.
• Approval rounds. One approver who answers in a couple of days keeps the schedule predictable. A chain of approvers across a studio and a licensor does not.
• Life after launch. If the plan includes events, new seasons, and live updates (what we call LiveOps), we’d treat the first year of support as its own budget line rather than folding it into the build, since it grows with how often you want to release events and updates.

As a reference point, here are the budget ranges from our indie game development cost guide (figures as of September 2026), grouped by scope:

These are typical market ranges for indie-scale teams, not a quote. Team sizes and timelines for each scope are in the guide.

Read the table with three limits in mind. It leaves out the costs only an IP game has: license fees and royalties paid to the rights holder, clearance for any likeness or music, and the time approval rounds add to the schedule. It also leaves out marketing. On a film tie-in the release date sets the schedule, so the scope is fitted to it. And what you’ll actually pay depends on your brief, so the useful number comes after we’ve seen it.

If you’re wondering how to adapt a story into a video game, start with a small playable version, which game teams call a demo or a vertical slice: one character, one place, and the main thing the player does, in near-final art. It answers three questions before you commit to the full game:

1. Does the world work as a game?
2. Does it look right to you and your fans?
3. What will the rest realistically cost?

It also tests the approval process. If one character takes two weeks to get signed off, you want to find that out now. And it doubles as a pitch: a playable demo gives a publisher or investor something real to react to, which a document can’t.

If your goal is publicity, such as a game that supports a film or a campaign, it helps to mention that when we speak. It shapes what we’d build first, and it may mean a short game is a better fit than a full one.

If you don’t have a development team, hand over the whole project. If you already have developers and need extra capacity or a specialist, add people to your team.

For a first-time IP owner, our game development services cover design, art, engineering, and testing through launch. If you have a studio and need engineers or artists working inside your production, that’s game co-development, the model we used on Ghostbusters. And if you only need extra people for a stretch, you can bring in dedicated developers.

If what you need is a publisher to fund and market the game, a development team won’t replace one. Budget is one of the most common blockers we hear about, and people usually go one of a few ways: a publisher who funds and markets the game, investors who back you once there’s a playable demo, crowdfunding, or paying for a small playable version first and using it as the pitch.  And if your world is still a few pages of notes, spending a little on a brief first usually saves money later.