Game Development Reference
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the harder it is to stay awake and code. I actually cheated a little and came in early,
but the long hours still were pretty tiring, especially after the fourth month.
At Red Fly, things were better, but crunch mode was still a reality. The simple fact
was that publishers
budgets and deadlines never allowed a game to be developed in a
manner that allowed 40-hour workweeks. For those of you who have heard of EA
spouse, the scandal that supposedly changed the games industry, I
'
m here to tell
you that the long hours were simply outsourced to third-party developers. To stay
alive, Red Fly had to work harder and faster than everyone else
'
and even then we
still had layoffs.
Good grief
when will this industry ever learn?
The Centinal
Sometimes there
s a badge of honor attached to working late hours. My old
boss at PlayFirst called it
'
which was a special club reserved
for those who had worked over 100 hours in a single week. Basic math will
tell you that there are only 168 hours in an Earth week. Mike and I are both
long-standing members of this not-so-exclusive club. That having been said,
there
The Centinal,
s an interesting camaraderie that gets forged when you spend that
much time with a group of people. We all come together to make
something great because we believe in the project and refuse to ship
something that
'
s not fun. When it gets to be 3 a.m. on a Tuesday night and
you know that tomorrow night is going to be even longer, the walls of social
etiquette come tumbling down.
'
Bah Humbug
Computer games are a seasonal business. They sell like crap in the summer, and
profits soar at Christmas time. Of course, they only soar for your project if you
re
not still working on it. This puts a significant amount of pressure on development
teams. Sometimes, the pressure begins before the team starts working. If you work
on downloadable titles, you can ' t earn money until you ship the game, so getting it
done before the holiday rush is important. If you are working on a retail title, things
are more difficult because of the time it takes to get your game on store shelves.
This lead time varies from publisher to publisher. A big company like Microsoft has
a huge manufacturing pipeline that includes everything from the latest version of
Halo to their latest version of Office. I once worked on a game that shipped the
same month as Windows XP. I
'
'
ll bet that if you were standing on the assembly line,
you
d be hard pressed to notice the brief flash of dark green as 50,000 boxes of my
game whizzed by. You shouldn
'
'
t be surprised to see that a publisher like Microsoft
 
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