For my MSc dissertation I'd like to hear you tales - good or bad - of crunches you've experienced. All completely anonymous, I'd just like to hear of circumstances surrounding the crunch; how it happened, duration, any similarities to other projects, how it could have been avoided etc.
Any information you can give me would be extremely useful!
Please feel free to contact me by email:
b.worrall (at) warwick (dot) ac (dot) uk
or post here if you have any questions.
Thanks!
Devs - I'd like to hear your tales of Crunch please
(4 posts)-
Posted 10 months ago #
-
Here's a story for you:
Try harder.
Posted 10 months ago # -
I'm a dev in retail doing some games dev in my own time.
Today I had cereal, and it was crunchy.
I also had some pickled onion monster much, they were very crunchy as I stored them in the fridge beforehand.Posted 10 months ago # -
I'm not in the games industry any more, but in over 9 years in it, I never needed to crunch for a single day.
Sure, there were numerous occasions where 'the studio' had to crunch, but I always took pleasure in the fact that I was always able to meet my deadlines and get all of my work done well within schedule.
I go by the simple philosophy that if you keep on schedule, there is never a need to crunch. The way I see it, crunching is only ever down to one of two things. Bad time management, or bad planning.
Having said that, when you get a combination of the two, the results can be spectacular.
My first job in the games industry was for one of the biggest studios in he UK at the time. When I first joined, I was working on one title, in parallel with another team, who were working on a different title that had been in development for about 3 years. Their title didn't ship until about 8 months after that. It was originally supposed to be a small showcase demo for the PS2 at launch, but the word was that Sony really liked it in it's early stages and pushed for it to be turned into a full blown AAA title.
in many ways, I was glad that I wasn't working on that game. All of the artists in the studio sat in the same area, and as I would look over my shoulder to see what they were working on, I saw them spending week, after week, after week, just optimising geometry.
Basically, they were removing polygons and textures from a massive load of assets.
Why? Because the game didn't run. It chugged along on PS2 at a feeble framerate, that practically made it unplayable. So they had to go back to work that had been built to exact specifications years ago and spend almost as much time as it took to build them in the first place, cutting things out.
Now, in fairness to the studio, apparently, this was partly Sony's fault.
Sony had told them that the PS2 was capable of much more than it was, and somewhere along the line, there was an understanding that the original higher poly art assets would be fine, once they were all in game. Or at least, that was the main defence of the situation.
To make things even worse, the studio was basically sitting there and watching the money roll in from a previous title. While that sentence might sound strange on it's own, what it meant was that half of the staff sat around playing Unreal and Half-Life over LAN almost all day long. This was before I got there, but the results of what had gone on before were pretty clear to see.
Eventually, as the game got closer to it's release date, that team had to crunch like nobody's business.
IIRC, There was a 3 or 4 month period where not a single one of them had a day off. They worked 12 or so hours a day, 7 days a week. I remember talking to one of the guys very close to release, and he wasn't far off looking like a real life zombie!
Why? Because of the disaster of a development project that had gone on in the first 2 years.
Now, although I wasn't involved with that, the ridiculous thing was that the almost exact same process was happening to the title that I was working on.
I was an environment artist, and the amount of times that I had to go back and change a signed off asset was ridiculous.
We got very meticulous specs for everything that we were making. They had to have this many polys, the polys had to be this size and shape, use this size of texture, etc, etc.
Then after a few months... 'Go back and add windows, so we can have them reflect the sun'. Ok, fair enough... Then once that was done, 'Right, the windows are slowing the game down even more. Go back and take them all out again'.
You what?
Then a bit later on, 'Ok, we're going Sony exclusive. Stop making Xbox versions'. Oh, finally a change that makes less work... ' Sorry, ignore what we said. Go back and make Xbox versions again'.
Aaaaargh!
Then once everything was in the game, the game chugged. It chugged like the previous title from the studio, and it chugged like title before that (which actually got released in a near broken state!)
At that point, I left studio. The game that I worked on didn't get released until about 2 years after that.
We spent a huge amount of time making a huge amount of assets. After release, I played a copy, and looked around to see what they'd managed to do, and massive amounts of it had been cut out. Probably just to get the thing running.
After that time, I mostly only ever worked for smaller studios where I had more responsibility for what I was doing, so any need to crunch would pretty much have been down to me.
There were a few days when I worked into the evening to meet a milestone, but nothing serious like I've described above.
And on those nights, I got free Indian takeaway, so I wasn't really complaining!
Posted 10 months ago #
Reply
You must log in to post.