Hold To Reset
Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up
Alex Hutchinson contextualises crunch, and how to too reduce it
Fifteen years ago, after working around 40 days back to back to get a build ready to show Sony during the early days of the PS2, I didn’t think it was possible to have a long career in games without doing yourself permanent damage. As a bunch of guys in their mid-20s with no other focus, it wasn’t even a scary thing – perversely, we kind of liked it. Five years later, while working at Maxis in Redwood Shores during the prelawsuit EA Spouse crunch period, it started to become less fun, and we all agreed that you could probably survive, but you couldn’t work in games and keep a healthy work/life balance.
Today, as game developers become more diverse, including in terms of age and lifestyles, things have started to change for the better. Around half the team at Typhoon have kids under the age of five, so for them, keeping work and expectations in balance is a necessity rather than a desire. Of equal importance is the half that don’t have kids, who are often straight out of school and have joined the business with a love of games, but also an expectation of a more normal schedule and a more balanced life.
The difficulty arises when we need to balance this with the burning necessity of making our first game work. If we fail, we’re most certainly out of business, and we are not in a financial position to solve challenges with more resources, so we’ve had to find solutions to keep people happy and motivated while shipping milestones and the occasional demo.
Our first decision was to be very wary of drifting into permanent demo mode. It’s an easy trap to fall into: there’s always someone you need to impress, or another industry show where you could raise money or find a new partner, but it can break a team. Allowing sufficient time to iterate on features, without needing to polish them so much that an external observer always understands what’s happening, has allowed us to fail fast and understand what’s working. But picking key milestones in advance, such as GDC, has allowed us to build rallying points in the schedule to bring everything together for some perspective, plus a chance to show those outside groups what we’re doing.
Unfortunately, it’s become obvious that it’s at these choke points that overtime becomes harder to avoid. Once we start needing to show external groups – whether it’s publishers, investors or press – we need to drive every feature we’re showing as close to shippable as possible. Anything where we ask a player to squint and imagine improvement is an opportunity for us to fail. When we have an immovable date, as well as finite resources, sometimes overtime is unavoidable.
This isn’t an ideal situation, obviously, but it doesn’t have to be torturous. We had a sixweek push before Christmas, but tried to preplan and structure it better than we have in the past: we kept weekends off-limits, asked for only one night of overtime per week, provided dinner and informed everyone in advance so the team could minimise the impact on their lives while still helping us keep the wheels turning.
It worked well, and while we didn’t make it mandatory, only one team member didn’t agree to it. He ended up choosing to start his own indie studio (although he still comes back for contracts). It brought up another interesting learning point for us: we want a broader range of people and perspectives, but we need unity in terms of long-term working goals. We didn’t start the company to pull a paycheque: we started it to make something special, and while we will do everything possible to get it done in a reasonable fashion, from the start we made it clear that we were going to push for quality, not just delivery.
It’s one of the core pleasures of starting a company that you don’t need to run it in the same way the previous places you worked at were run. Should we allow interns? Fuck yeah. Should we be a crunch factory? Please no. Should we blur the lines between job roles so artists can build encounters and engineers can design features? Absolutely. Do we need everyone pulling during the tough periods to get that done? We think so.
It’s a hard collection of questions to quantify, so I’m using a very specific, subjective measure: this Friday we say farewell to our first art intern, Mattea Price, who is starting her fine arts degree at Dawson College here in Montreal. She’s the daughter of one of our senior artists, and she’ll soon have the opportunity to do whatever she wants. I think we’ll know if we made the right choices if she decides to come back after she graduates to help us make another game.
We didn’t start the company to pull a paycheque: we started it to make something special