This is fundamentally a management problem, and that’s where you need to start looking for clues.
Once the game has shipped, the important thing is to identify what went wrong with the process. The latter isn’t nice, but if this is a cookie-cutter game in a crowded genre, then throwing good money after bad is not a good idea. At that point I’d have to make a call to either move the ship date and allocate more money, or leave everything the same and tell the project manager to cut features and content until the scope fits the budget. If a AAA game is behind schedule, then you should know about it many months ahead of time. We’re going to assume that this game had a more or less normal development cycle but it’s behind schedule anyway.Īre we just hearing about this delay at the last minute? Hopefully not. I didn’t cut their budget or steal a chunk of their team for a pet project.
#Captain crunch video game movie
The publisher (me) didn’t throw them any last-minute curve-balls like “Oh, we also want this game to run on the Wii U and support mutiplayer and also have mobile integration, and no I can’t give you more money for that.” They weren’t forced to do any last-minute changes to the design to adapt to changes in the market Like maybe the Battle Royale fad is over, or everyone realized their protagonist just happens to look like a hated character in a terrible movie that just came out. The team didn’t lose any equipment, data, or key leaders. For now let’s assume that the delay isn’t caused by misfortune. and interrupted my nap with news that Shoot Guy 7 It took me a long time to persuade them to not name it “Shoo7 Guy”. Someone has just entered my lavish executive office at Ginormous Videogame Funtime Superconglomerate Inc. If a game needs more than 6 weeks of crunch to hit its ship date, then you can’t save the ship date with crunch because the team will burn out before they get there. Sure, that number is fairly arbitrary, but I think that’s right around the point where people start to burn out and you’re doing more harm than good. If I was the president of videogames, I’d put a hard cap on crunch of 6 weeks. So how would I handle this? Since You Asked…ĪLSO STAYS CRUNCHY WHILE GOUGING DEEP, SLOW- HEALING LACERATIONS IN THE SOFT PARTS OF YOUR PALATE. The pursuit of an unattainable ideal will prevent you from building a robust system. Saying teams should never crunch is like saying that airbags are a waste of money because accidents shouldn’t happen in the first place. If feature creep is a problem when schedules are tight, then how much worse will it be when everyone has lots of “extra” time? You can insist that all game budgets should be mapped out perfectly and then sufficiently padded, but this ignores the way that creative projects will expand to consume available resources. Jerks will cause problems, misfortune will strike, people will make mistakes, and equipment will fail. This is a world of finite resources, bedeviled by selfish jackasses, subject to entropy, and filled with unpredictability. As an engineer, I’m much more comfortable with designing systems with a bit of fault tolerance than designing systems that are perfect as long as nothing ever goes wrong. It’s built on the premise that since all mistakes are avoidable, you can avoid all mistakes. Some people take the hardline stance that “crunch should never happen”, and I just can’t get behind that idea. They cover it until the destruction ends and the mess is cleaned up Actually, they probably stop covering it when people stop watching, but you know what I mean. The news doesn’t stop covering a natural disaster just because it’s day 3 and everyone knows about it. On the other hand, it’s even more silly that this is still a problem after all these years. On one hand, it feels silly to cover the same topic again and again. My column this week will be a bit of a re-run for those of you who have been around long enough to remember the last time I brought up crunch mode in video game development.
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