Much Ado about Crunch
Tuesday, February 16, 2010 at 8:24AM I recently had the opportunity to write up a piece dealing with solutions surrounding crunch for Gamasutra. This is an issue near and dear to my heart, and also what motivated my jump from the Art discipline to Project Management.
The senselessness of crunch-based production, and its human costs, have been a passion for many years. As fate would have it, a handful of opportunities have come in my career (at Spark Unlimited, Midway Austin, and Heatwave Interactive) to experiment with some solutions, and to unearth what I believe to be the root cause of crunch: premature production.
Anyways, please click through and have a read. If anyone out there has alternative or opposing thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
Article -- A Closer Look At Crunch
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Reader Comments (1)
The Gamasutra article is so much more than just about crunch. I'll be passing it on to many at my studio.
One of my pet peeves for many years in a capacity unable to control pre-production and prototyping timeframes, was that they seemed to be set blindly to a period of time that was a either a percentage of the overall development time or dictated from corporate penny pushers rather than a calculated estimate based on a considered game vision. More often than not this pushed development teams into a production false start before the vision of the game could be created and bought into. Of course this caused everything from late project crunch to complete restarts and layoffs, with those left standing completely losing trust in management. I could go on... but thanks for a great article.