Hold To Reset
Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up
Alex Hutchinson considers games’ uniquely unhealthy crunch habit
Do you remember Bam Entertainment? It was a short-lived publisher of shovelware that raised a bunch of money by pitching that it could get cheap movie licences and turn them into even cheaper games, then burnt all the cash and went out of business almost immediately. (Not to be confused with Brash Entertainment, which had the same pitch and did the same exact thing.) Anyway, in 2002 I had pitched a PS2 launch game to them called
Ice 9 for an impossibly small amount of money that was originally based on the Colin Farrell star vehicle The Recruit. It died quickly and painfully, but before that we crunched hard. Like, ‘sleep at your desk’ hard. ‘Break up with your partner and then drive to the airport at eight in the morning after not sleeping for two days to present the game to Sony’ hard.
We had already been denied approval, so this was our last chance, and right before I was about to present, an otherwise pleasant Sony rep leaned in and whispered, “Just so you know, Sony has decided to never approve anything from Bam ever again. But good luck.” Needless to say they remained unconvinced. So what was the point of all those extra hours? It was a destructive and pointless crunch that neither saved the project nor enriched our lives, and in retrospect it’s an easy one to dismiss. But I’ve crunched on every game I’ve made, to some extent, and I honestly don’t expect that to ever change.
However, I think there’s a big difference between positive overtime and negative crunch. I’ve never been bothered putting in the extra hours to make something better, but I’ve often resented being pushed to turn up just to make a game work at all. There is an obvious need for better management, more realistic planning, and a lifetime ban on the expectation that developers will make up for failures of management with long hours for no compensation. But game development is full of unexpected moments, and I’m not sure a lot of them are avoidable – or even if I would want them to be.
Games combine art and technology in ways that are still massively challenging, meaning development is a stream of new problems and massive opportunities, both of which put huge pressure on the best laid plans. But there are ways we can improve.
For one, we compress our development phases in a deeply unhealthy way that doesn’t exist in other media. We are often in production before we have truly achieved our pre-production goals, and I’m almost always on tour promoting the game while still editing the content, and we’re making trailers from half-finished games. Maybe it’s a throwback to the bedroom-coding roots of gamedev when there was no need for process or structure, but we can at least plan rampups better and wait until the game is finished before promoting it. Gone are the days when you would sell games based on a graphical feature that could potentially be quickly copied. We can wait. It’s better for devs and better for players.
We should also improve how we carry staff across projects and teams. One of the strengths of Ubi Montreal is that they can roll large chunks of the ‘content’ teams across projects, meaning they can avoid having too many people during pre-production and can ramp down fast without having to let people go. To get the same result, a small team like ours may need to strike a balance between fulltime staff and contractors or outsourcing: if you do it well, you can add time at each production phase without absolutely destroying your budget or your team.
That said, sometimes it’s in the culture of the place. Some studios are renowned crunch factories, others have had permanent, mandatory overtime nights in trade for permanent free weekends, and some have refused to crunch at all – and I’ve seen all flavours succeed and fail. The challenge comes when individuals are at odds with the studio culture: I’ve had to kick people out of the office because they just wanted to keep working when we thought it was unhealthy, and similarly we’ve had people refuse to do a single minute of overtime even when we desperately needed just a bit more for the good of the project.
On the edge of the big push toward a December announcement, we’re trying to find the right balance for Typhoon, and the hardest question to answer is this: how much extra push would be too much, if the other option is wasting a few years of our lives?
We compress our development phases in a deeply unhealthy way that doesn’t exist in other media