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This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

shamusyoung.com

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Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are saying then that the animations are 'minimal' in the Arkham games, which they are not. To make the animation as fluent as it is would require a lot of work and tweaking. Street Fighter on the other hand has a defined set of animations that are played independently of the attack animation, resulting in far less work but overall less satisfying visuals.

Finally, of course you can build the environment separately if there is no dependency on it.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#42

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…

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.

Agile is no magic bullet. Additionally 'change' means a very different thing when you are talking about in-flexible data (3d models, textures, animation etc), and usually means throwing the data away completely and starting over. This is a lot more work that adding a form field to a web page, or changing the business logic behind a query by moving some code around.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#43
post #17
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

Paying overtime would solve a lot of project management issues in tech companies. Overtime is for free so why try to avoid it? If people get burnt out after a while there are plenty of people who are happy to replace them.

I think this is the crux of the problem - in the US and Canada (at least) there is an IT class of professionals that are exempt from overtime. Why? Please someone tell me why?

And it's not just the gaming industry.

I am involved with 10 projects right now (way more than my usual load). 1 of them has a reasonable schedule (though my component is sort of aggressively scheduled), 3 have completely ridiculous schedules (from day one requiring overtime and weekend work to complete), 1 has stupid political nonsense going on which makes it a complete cluster that is making the timeline silly, 2 others are being rushed in phases, since the timeline was stupid to begin with, 2 others are crunched because they are related to the 3 that have stupid timelines (forcing the team to split in to 5 different teams and work in parallel) and the last one is being finalized but had some pressures on my component, which rushed my work.

So, anecdotally, 90% of the projects I am involved in currently have issues with their scheduling.

As I have been involved with software/hardware development since 1995, my experience suggests this is nothing new.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#44
post #29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Release dates aren't going anywhere as long as there's a traditional retail chain and marketing spends. You can do a hell of a lot to just pay workers overtime - people in the film industry in LA may work overtime, but if they go overbudget it comes out of the show runners cut. In software overtime is just free time, and they'll squeeze you out like an orange and replace you with a new fresh eyed person when you can'…

> In software overtime is just free time, and they'll squeeze you out like an orange and replace you with a new fresh eyed person when you can't go anymore. Thankfully, in many European countries software development is under the same rules as any other job, and one is entitled to get either free time or money form those extra hours. Granted not all companies play ball, but then one can make them play ball, if they f…

The "management" exemption is often heavily abused to extend unpaid overtime. It happens at e.g. Rockstar and Jagex.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are saying then that the animations are 'minimal' in the Arkham games, which they are not. To make the animation as fluent as it is would require a lot of work and tweaking. Street Fighter on the other hand has a defined set of animations that are played independently of the attack animation, resulting in far less work but overall less satisfying visuals. Finally, of course you can build the environment separatel…

> "You are saying then that the animations are 'minimal' in the Arkham games, which they are not."

I'm saying for playtesting they are the minimum you need to do the playtesting. If playtesting is a priority then you work on the elements important for playtesting first. "Minimal" is not a reflection on the amount of work that goes into getting up to the playtesting baseline.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#46

"scheduling is hard"?? Yeah, if you have no fucking clue what you are doing I guess everything is hard! Shipping successful products on time and in-budget is not rocket science! The right people are out there...you just have to hire for it.

It is not hard at all, but typically external pressures force people to agree to things that don't make sense. I have a client that has an event every year at the same time (let's say it's mid-July. They want projects to be completed before this event every year. But for some reason, they don't start planning these projects until let's say end of April. So every year it's the same crazy pressure and quality issues.

If only the planning for these projects started in say, October? But no, in October the team is still dealing with the fallout of the poorly planned projects of the current year.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#47

All those words and none of them touch upon the obvious financial bullshittery of being expected to work as much as double time for the same salary.

When I started my career I worked for a University and then a private scientific engineering/manufacturing company. The latter was purchased by a public company. They cut 20% of the staff and expected the same output. This has been going on for 20 years.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agile is no magic bullet. Additionally 'change' means a very different thing when you are talking about in-flexible data (3d models, textures, animation etc), and usually means throwing the data away completely and starting over. This is a lot more work that adding a form field to a web page, or changing the business logic behind a query by moving some code around.

This^^^. Scheduling for some types of software is harder than others. I mean it's always a pain in the neck, but not necessarily intractable.

I used to work on shrinkwrapped tools for SQL Server and .NET developers, and over time got pretty good at scheduling releases with an ever narrowing window (that was never that wide to begin with), even accounting for the inevitable changes you'd need to make as you got customers to try out the software throughout the project. And you needed some degree of certainty over scheduling in order to coordinate with marketing, make sure sales and product support were trained, dovetail with other projects so that people could be reassigned, etc. Key point, as well: teams are cross-functional, but relatively small.

Line of business apps are trickier because you're often dealing with stakeholders who either aren't sure, or can't well express, what they need. You also have the kind of integration problems that occur much less often than with shrinkwrapped software. Cynically, I feel like a lot of unwillingness to schedule for these kinds of projects - especially for moderate team size/complexity - is really because people just don't like doing it, for a variety of reasons. And by schedule, I mean sit down and do the homework as it were in detail, not just throw a convenient date up on the board (I've never seen anyone do a good job of estimating a software project in the large this way, and it doesn't help the business make informed decisions when you end up shifting the date or cutting functionality under duress later on).

You get similar problems with public facing web apps: because you can roll out a new version of the software whenever you want this allows you to chop and change functionality as needed (or wanted), so things can grow tentacles. Team size and complexity can vary a lot here but, obviously, bigger, more complex teams make it harder to schedule. If you're rolling out functionality incrementally though, this may not present a big issue commercially.

Games are a whole other thing, because the feel of playing, and the fun factor are absolutely key. This is also why I don't think film development is a great analogue for game development. Film is not interactive, but games are, which adds a layer of complexity film doesn't need to worry about. And this comes whilst having a production team of a comparable size and complexity to that of a film for big budget games.

To be honest though, I'm not sure how much team size and complexity factors in with games - just watch the Indiegame film where you have very small teams in all cases, yet (particularly memorable with Fez) development takes massively longer than expected, and involves a rewrite to get the game right. If that hadn't happened it wouldn't have been as good a game.

Like I say, I think games really are a different kind of problem - perhaps the closest thing software project management has to an NP-hard problem. It's really no surprise they ship late, and that crunch is a reality. Perma-crunch though: well, that just makes me feel sick to think about.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#49
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the problem. The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem. The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or the contractor over the head with to force overtime and cr…

> The problem is that each step in the process is variable, and it's not variable by a small amount but potentially up to a magnitude. That's the problem. That's not unique to game development. Or software. Or any industry, really. > The second problem is that the industry does not pay for reasonable estimates, they want imperfect unreasonable estimates which are very conservative with which to beat the employee or t…

> That's not unique to game development. Or software. Or any industry, really.

Yes, it is. It's not literally unique to software, because R&D and "nobody ever made something like this" projects share it, but most industries don't.

Re: This Dumb Industry: In Defense of Crunch

#50
post #5

Nope, nope, fuck you. Voluntary crunch leads to a culture of overtime. You won't be considered a "team player" if you decide that you don't want to spend weekends and extra hours in an industry where you make 40% less than your peers. I feel even stronger about this after having a kid. There's no way I'm destroying the relationship I have with my family for your product. I saw it again and again when I was in the ind…

The problem with crunch is similar to the problem with open plan offices, there's very much a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that worms its way into people's minds. A studio will work on a title on a tight schedule, and they'll go into crunch, and get it out close to schedule and have a successful launch. Then they'll start to believe that crunch is good. Similarly, people in open plan offices will have serendipit…

> So many people view it as their dream job, and that means they tend to tolerate a lot of bad behavior from their employers, especially when they're younger.

Same thing applies to acting and production jobs in film/TV/theater.

We all wanna be where the magic happens.

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