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This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

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Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#31

Post by hacker_9 »

patio11 wrote: post #22

When people who work in the games industry say they crunch because they're young men with poor boundaries who would do anything to make video games, and when industry veterans literally write PowerPoint decks about hiring suggesting targeting young men with poor boundaries because you can get them to crunch since they will do anything to write video games, I choose to believe their words. This lines up with external…

I think you might be missing the point of the article. The metric for measuring a game's success is how fun it is to play. You can't plan fun, that only comes from having a playground and tweaking things until the game play feels satisfying. Note I use words like fun and satisfying - words that are all highly subjective, and can only really be ticked off when you have the game in front of you and can agree it was fun to play.

The metric for measuring the success of software on the other hand is directly proportional to the amount of functionality it implements, as defined in the requirement spec. These totally different goals for development are the reason the industries are so different, and why one is harder to plan for than the other.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#32

Post by hacker_9 »

Animats wrote: post #3

If game development paid overtime, game scheduling would be as well developed as film scheduling is. When a film goes over budget, the director and producer usually get their share cut. I've written about this before. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9557954

And yet if it was the other way round, maybe our films would be better and actually make sense.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#33

Post by ZenoArrow »

hacker_9 wrote: post #31
patio11 wrote: post #22

When people who work in the games industry say they crunch because they're young men with poor boundaries who would do anything to make video games, and when industry veterans literally write PowerPoint decks about hiring suggesting targeting young men with poor boundaries because you can get them to crunch since they will do anything to write video games, I choose to believe their words. This lines up with external…

I think you might be missing the point of the article. The metric for measuring a game's success is how fun it is to play. You can't plan fun, that only comes from having a playground and tweaking things until the game play feels satisfying. Note I use words like fun and satisfying - words that are all highly subjective, and can only really be ticked off when you have the game in front of you and can agree it was fun…

You don't have to build the whole game to get started on testing how fun it is to play, you start with an ideas sandbox and go from there. A large part of modern game development is involved in building up art assets, you only need a minimal set of art assets before you start playtesting and refining ideas.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#34

Post by hacker_9 »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #33
hacker_9 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be missing the point of the article. The metric for measuring a game's success is how fun it is to play. You can't plan fun, that only comes from having a playground and tweaking things until the game play feels satisfying. Note I use words like fun and satisfying - words that are all highly subjective, and can only really be ticked off when you have the game in front of you and can agree it was fun…

You don't have to build the whole game to get started on testing how fun it is to play, you start with an ideas sandbox and go from there. A large part of modern game development is involved in building up art assets, you only need a minimal set of art assets before you start playtesting and refining ideas.

Not always true. For example the combat animation in the Arkham games - without it how do you test the combat is satisfying? Or the super cars in GTA, how to you test they break in interesting ways without having the finished mesh? Or the gun projectiles in Fallout - how do you tweak them to feel right without a good bullet mesh, physics, collision, particle effects and so on? Satisfying game play is just as visual as it is functional.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#35

Post by ZenoArrow »

hacker_9 wrote: post #34
ZenoArrow wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to build the whole game to get started on testing how fun it is to play, you start with an ideas sandbox and go from there. A large part of modern game development is involved in building up art assets, you only need a minimal set of art assets before you start playtesting and refining ideas.

Not always true. For example the combat animation in the Arkham games - without it how do you test the combat is satisfying? Or the super cars in GTA, how to you test they break in interesting ways without having the finished mesh? Or the gun projectiles in Fallout - how do you tweak them to feel right without a good bullet mesh, physics, collision, particle effects and so on? Satisfying game play is just as visual a…

I said minimal, not zero. To use your Arkham combat example, you do need to build the character animations, but you don't need to build the Arkham city environment in which those combat animations will eventually take place.

To give a visual example, in Street Fighter 5 there's the training stage, which is very simple but ideal for testing character animations and game mechanics. If you were developing Street Fighter 5, wouldn't you build such an environment first?

http://media.eventhubs.com/images/2015/07/07_betapics02.jpg

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#37

Post by andrewvc »

hacker_9 wrote: post #31
patio11 wrote: post #22

When people who work in the games industry say they crunch because they're young men with poor boundaries who would do anything to make video games, and when industry veterans literally write PowerPoint decks about hiring suggesting targeting young men with poor boundaries because you can get them to crunch since they will do anything to write video games, I choose to believe their words. This lines up with external…

I think you might be missing the point of the article. The metric for measuring a game's success is how fun it is to play. You can't plan fun, that only comes from having a playground and tweaking things until the game play feels satisfying. Note I use words like fun and satisfying - words that are all highly subjective, and can only really be ticked off when you have the game in front of you and can agree it was fun…

A major point of the agile manifesto was that building any software to a waterfall spec results in unhappy users. Even enterprise software is iteratively designed these days (well at good places at least). Games are not special.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#38

Post by ZenoArrow »

fenomas wrote: post #24
vvanders wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite, from the article: > Perma-crunch is stupid and destructive, but voluntary crunch by people who are trying to push the medium is a good thing. Hard work is not bad or evil. Great things can happen when you’re willing to push. The thing with voluntary crunch is it becomes institutionalized and part of your company culture. If you don't pitch in you're managed down and out since there's always some poor soul…

> The thing with voluntary crunch is it becomes institutionalized and part of your company culture. That's exactly what the author argues teams must avoid. His premise is explicitly that a little crunch isn't harmful as long as it's not an institutionalized part of the company culture.

A little crunch is harmful too, just less harmful.

Crunch is rarely a necessity. If the deadline can't be moved, and you're going to miss it, work on cutting the workload (drop features, etc...). If the project can't have any corners cut, then move the deadline. If neither of these is an option, then do what you have to do and find new managers for the next project, because they should've been more on the ball and planned for potential slippage by giving a time buffer to avoid crunch.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#39

Post by FussyZeus »

ry_ry wrote: post #30
FussyZeus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and as a consumer of games I find crunch stupid and unnecessary. If a game needs another week just DELAY IT A WEEK. This idea that once marketing sets a date of completion that it's a total must-make is complete nonsense.

On the other hand, Star Citizen. It's wild profits undermine my point slightly, granted, but games like duke nukem forever suffered hugely from When It's Ready, poor expectation management, and final products ultimately not living upto the hype.

Duke Nukem wasn't a case of crunch though, it was a case of severe mismanagement and lack of any real direction. Crunch would not have saved it. The vast majority of titles given a delay of two weeks or even a month or two in extreme cases would not undermine sales.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#40

Post by FussyZeus »

ludamad wrote: post #19
FussyZeus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and as a consumer of games I find crunch stupid and unnecessary. If a game needs another week just DELAY IT A WEEK. This idea that once marketing sets a date of completion that it's a total must-make is complete nonsense.

Except it isn't. An entire company could be jeopardized for missing eg a holiday deadline.

That's quite possibly true now, though I'd argue that is largely because game publishers killed the goose that laid the golden egg by shipping tons of totally broken games and ruining the idea of pre-ordering. Likewise I think that process could be reversed by showing fans that the company brass actually gives a damn about their product enough to delay it when it needs more time.

Nintendo is a fantastic example of this, I would say this happens to a good chunk of their titles, Zelda especially. Yes it's always a bummer, but Nintendo also hasn't had an Arkham City or a Division where the game comes out half finished, full of bugs, with the promise of "we'll patch it later."

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