Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Germany, and the cost of failure would have been catastrophic for his country and
the entire world.
Game companies consistently ask for a similar commitment on the part of their
employees
—
to work long hours for months, even years on end. What a crime! It
'
s
one thing to save a nation from real tyranny, but it
s quite another to make a com-
puter game. This is especially true when the culprit is overscoping the project, blind
to the reality of a situation, and has a lack of skill in project management.
It is a known fact that under a normal working environment, projects can be artifi-
cially time-compressed up to 20 percent by working more hours. This is the equivalent
of asking the entire team to work eight extra hours on Saturday. I define a normal
working environment as one where people don
'
t have their lives, liberty, or family at
stake. This schedule can be kept up for months if the team is well motivated.
'
Take a Break
—
You
'
ll Be Better for It
It was this schedule that compressed Ultima VIII after a last-minute feature
addition: Origin asked the team to ship the game in two extra languages,
German and French. The team bloated to nearly three times its original
size, adding native German and French speakers to write the tens of
thousands of lines of conversation and test the results. We worked overtime
for five weeks
60 hours per week, and we took the sixth week and worked
a normal workweek, which averaged 50 hours. This schedule went on from
August to March, or eight months. Youth and energy went a long way, and
in the end, we did ship the game when the team thought we were going to
ship the game, but everyone was exhausted beyond their limits.
—
Weeks later, however, it was clear that the game wasn
t all we wanted it to be. Our collective exhaustion
at the end caused me and others to make some bad decisions about what we should fix. Reviews were
coming in, and they weren
'
t good. A few months down the road, the team got back together to fix many
of the biggest problems, and we released a patch, which by all accounts was much better.
'
The moral of this story
it is possible to crunch like crazy, and it may seem like you are achieving your
goals, but in the end, your game will suffer for it. Working overtime works only to solve short-term
problems, not long-term disasters.
—
Go Home
There
s an odd competition among some game developers concerning how
they deal with crunch. If you sleep in the office, you are somehow more
dedicated than someone who goes home, even if you work the same hours. I
have only slept in the office once in my career. I was 18 years old and working
in QA at Maxis on SimCity3000. It was late so I decided to get a few hours of
sleep on a large stuffed alligator in the server room. I barely slept at all, I felt
awful, and I probably didn
'
'
t smell great since we didn
'
t have a shower in that
building. It
s not worth it. I would rather sleep in my own bed for four hours
than sleep on a stuffed alligator in the server room for six hours.
'
