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Crunch time has been on my mind lately. Evidently I'm not the only one, as displayed by this excellent Gamasutra article against the practice. But, I will take a stand firmly in favor of crunch time, and explain why it is delicious as well as nutritious.
But first, please allow me to set the stage... our studio has been crunching now for the past 6 weeks, and it ends tomorrow! Understandably, that's why it's been on my mind. I can't wait. Summer is teasing Pittsburgh with it's whispered delights, and we are about to go wide with our beta program in preparation for the upcoming school year. These are exciting times, and it's been the crunch that makes them all the more sweet!
Why nutritious? Well, that's obvious from the studio's perspective. We are small, fewer than 15 devs plus some support staff in the form of customer care, quality assurance, etc. While only production folks have been required to work for ten hours a day, that's still a major win in the man-hours column, with over 900 hours of additional time spent on the product! That's 22.5 extra weeks of polish.
Now, I understand the "bad management" argument (some might say I resemble that remark.) For those of you who are not familiar with it, the line of reasoning goes something like this... "if the project was well managed, you wouldn't need crunch time." I don't agree.
Management competence aside, who would not want an extra 22.5 weeks of polish on any product? Also, having been around the block a few times, I've seen both poorly and immaculately managed projects require, or at least benefit from, crunch time. At the end of a project, time compresses.
Just like a garage of any size will end up full of junk, and the most gargantuan hard drive will eventually need to be backed up, there's always room for more polish! Most of us do not have Blizzard's godlike status and the luxury of "shipping it when it's ready."
So what about delicious? For those of you who know me or have read the odd blog here and there, it may seem contradictory to come out in praise of crunch time for someone who abhors corporate dehumanization. Indeed.
Crunchtime, how do I love thee? Let me bullet-point the ways:
- It's the playoffs -- if a project were a basketball season, and the team were a... well, team, then crunch time is the playoffs. It's what you live for, where the ultimate rewards and tests are to be found. You get bruised, you find out what you are made of. You work all season for it, and you plan your energy around that championship.
- It' a warzone -- it's been said that soldiers don't ultimately fight for their country, or their ideals, or even because they are told to. No, they fight for the guy next to them in the foxhole when it really comes down to it. I'm a pacifist, but this makes sense on a certain level, and I've seen it in action. A crunch team is a team that comes together for each other... ideally.
- It's closure -- in a world of uncertainty, blurry lines, and seemingly endless iteration, crunch time is something tangible and final. When it's done, you can tell the difference! Colors seem brighter, food tastes better, and games are fun to play again.
All this assumes that the process has been managed well! The team needs to know what to expect: When's the deadline? How long will crunch last? How many hours am I expected to work? Is that light at the end of the tunnel a train?
Try to keep it humane. Ten to twelve hours a day is what I call "normal," so I don't ask anything of the team that I won't and don't do myself. Weekends are only on the table as an option of last resort, though people tend to work through the weekend from home as needed based on progress toward their weekly goals.
Same thing for late nights and all-nighters -- unless there is a truly desperate need, don't go there. Also, if your team doesn't get along well to begin with, then none of the "foxhole" gains will mean anything.
Some will complain that what I describe here is Crunch Lite. Yeah, it is. I think that diminishing returns will indeed wipe out any gains made from too many extra hours. People need to recuperate, and crunching should be sustainable to work well. Weekends are important, usually one day is used up decompressing and the second for laundry and life.
Finally, game studios tend to foster the kind of creative and light-hearted workplace that many folks in entertainment industries enjoy. I've heard it described as the barely-controlled chaos of an adult kindergarten.
Hopefully, this helps people bond, like each other, and want to come to work each day. But there needs to be a time to grow up, a time where every single person on the team pulls weight, works for the greater good, and knows that we are dead serious about our customers having fun.
Tomorrow morning I get to declare an end to crunch time, and will update our Captain Crunch poster to something new and, one hopes, clever. But I will do so with the great satisfaction of knowing we made it to the final round, grew closer as a team, and delivered something great to our students. Someday, these will be the times we look back on and tell stories about; the ones we savor. Mmmmm, delicious!
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If you didn't schedule your crunch time (it's actual, real emergency crunch, which is increasingly rare) - then you're a bad manager.
"Management competence aside, who would not want an extra 22.5 weeks of polish on any product?"
Me, if it means I am being exploited by the company I work for.
Is this really a serious post?
Sounds like the very definition of mismanagement to me.
You may find it inconceivable, but one of our "exploited" employees (who had been through a major product launch previously) actually requested crunch time even though we were tracking fine on our sched. He really wanted everyone to come together to make the very best possible quality product, not just something that we could check off of a list (we all feel this way and agreed to the extra effort.) And since we are all salaried, there is no such thing as overtime -- we simply do whatever it takes." Flipping burgers? Yeah, you can count the hours, but not so much in entertainment.
Also, I don't understand how anything here comes off as deliberately creating a sub-optimal situation. Who would that benefit? Me? The team? Our products? The company? What would the motive be? Assume for a moment that "the man" is not inherently evil and cares about the individuals on the team, and the product, and the health of the company simultaneously. Imagine that he has a difficult juggling act to perform to balance these elements. From that perspective, how so?
As a project manager, I am competent but not great. As a team leader... pretty durn good. Creative? Fuggedaboutit. If inspiring and grooming a team to care enough to do great work and put in more hours is mismanagement, I can live with that. If any overtime or crunch whatsoever means "deathmarch" to you, good luck.
I was hoping to show that crunch can make a good product better and benefit the team in some intangible ways. Also, that it can be done reasonably and with compassion. Finally, by leading through example I imagined that the team would be able to see a model of success and how to achieve that through their own personal work ethic. By writing about it here... I just thought I'd share one perspective and set of experiences.
Thanks for your comments!
First, I don't think we should be defining crunch time as exceeding some threshold number of hours. IMO, crunch is basically whenever your work/life balance is involuntarily, and significantly, skewed toward work. Everybody's needs are a different. I'm a single guy, so my "life" obligations are pretty low; I don't have a wife or girlfriend to attend to, kids to take care of, etc., so when I'm working overtime it's not really impacting much other than my energy level. But someone with a spouse and kids is going to need more "life" time, so crunch comes sooner and hits harder.
Second, you talk about your employees *requesting* crunch time, and this is actually an argument that came up recently with the Epic kerfluffle as well, and I want to reiterate my argument from that topic here. Specifically, I believe that it's your responsibility as a manager to make sure that your employees aren't *allowed* to overwork themselves. Again, that varies from person to person, and in most cases people aren't going to request crunch time at unhealthy levels given their needs. But we're a passionate bunch, and it's easy to get caught up in our work, especially when we're trying to polish and perfect it. IMO, a responsible manager not only *doesn't* force his team into crunch, but in fact *does* force his team to go home and attend to their lives once in a while when they're in legitimate danger of overworking themselves.
I don't think many -- if any -- project managers deliberately create sub-optimal situations, as was suggested earlier, but I do think there's widespread complacency in our industry -- even in this post-EA_Spouse world -- that leads to people just accepting crunch as a fact of life. That attitude is guaranteed *not* to improve quality of life.
So in that case I don't think it's a managment issue. You could schedule 3 months extra on the end and you'll still have people crunching the last 6 weeks.
Of course, when that kind of thing is part of the culture or planned in to meet milestones, I feel that is a managment issue and wrong on the part of the company. Nobody should work 70 hours a week for months at a go.
You describe scheduling projects so that crunch is necessary, thereby creating that situation.
The team coming together because of playoffs, working in a war zone, and because they want to finish the project so that they can escape the soul crushing grind is them rectifying your mistakes.
This is all directly from your post, am I some how misreading this entirely?
Claiming that because you are salaried employees means that you "do what it takes" and that there is "no such thing as overtime" is sort of offensive to me. It has the automatic implication that the employee owes the company more than the company owes him. Salaried positions are supposed to benefit both partners, but not by allowing the company to get more work for free. If you hire your employees with the assumption that they will be working 50 hours a week, then you need to compensate them fairly for their time. Otherwise you are relying on their love for what they are doing preventing them from getting a job that pays fairly in a different company or in a different industry.
I would like to say also that I don't specifically mind crunch when things go wrong and problems need to be solved, it is crunch as a process of development that I have a problem with.
@Bob - Great point. I like the idea of comparing the video game industry in that way as a reality check.
@Josh - I agree, the idea of the manager's responsibility being not only to the project, but the well-being of his team is important.
Furthermore, at least one of these comments are putting the entire blame of crunch on management. Is there no possibility that someone else didn't make a mistake that set the entire team back? Is it possible that other employees are being a bit lazy and hindering progress? It's a team effort, and sure, management needs to be on the ball, but so does everyone else.
And besides, the economy simply might not allow The Man to higher a handful of new employees in order to meet deadlines. With the economy as it is, teams will be smaller and individuals will have to work harder in order to meet the same deadlines with the same quality.
Ultimately, of course, I would prefer to never have to resort to crunch.
Mistress Crunch: We are dead serious about people having fun!
MC: ..why aren't you dead slave? Model me weapons so I can beat you with them!
these people are weak, we could stay up all night and make ya some posters!
I do think that spreading crunch time across the project is a fine idea, but crunch often happens because of the unforeseen. You can't evenly distribute the unforeseen, because it happens when it happens. Spreading your crunch will only mean that you'll have a bunch of tired people when the REAL crunch happens. More than 4 extra hours a week is too much if you plan to spread it around, but don't expect more than this when the REAL crunch hits also. Remember that even 4 hours a week adds up to 25 work days unpaid in the year. Adding REAL crunch on top of that will only widen the gap of gratitude that you owe to your staff.
From my experiences, crunch often occurs because of design changes or overambitious designs. Let's face it, if we built the product that we set out to make from the beginning games would cost $1M to develop over 12 months using a team of like 11 people or less. When I think of development I feel like a moving company worker holding a heavy couch and listening to the owner say, "I don't like that, maybe it will look better over there.". The only thing it's doing is holding up all of the other furniture that is still in the truck. Games aren't much different and often suffer with crunch times or delayed release dates.
I do feel that it is managements job to reduce the amount of design changes and help separate the people with the money and the people with the skills to make the game. They need to be the firefighter, not the ones starting fires with crunch time mandates.
I'll leave you with these few management-phrases free of charge...
- "You know ____, the team really needs you to stay late."
- "I really need you to be a team player right now."
- "We're all working really hard. What time is it? I'm late for dinner, we'll pick this up in the morning."
- "I know you've been here into all hours of the night these past months, but I really need to talk to you about your tardiness."
- After weeks of crunching... "We need to talk. You've really been dragging this last week. Oh btw, I need you to come in on Saturday."
- "Pizza in the break room! (for those working late only)"
- "I know your kid is not feeling well, but can you get your husband/wife of keep an eye on him/her? We have a build to do tonight and we really need you here."
- "You're scheduled for 40hrs of work right now, but there are a couple of missing features that aren't on anyone's plate. I'm just going to massage your schedule and see what I can come up with."
- "As a treat for everyone's hard work these last few months, movie night! Movie starts at 7:15pm. See you guys back at the office after the movie."
Okay I'll stop! =)
No matter which sweet worlds they have, it's for them just business and they will fire you out. I do lots of overtime where I work as graphics designer. I really wish I could be in home studying game design or working for some contest, games are the only thing I work/study about 24/7 and unpaid, but I still need money to do it. Business...
Management is often a "people" skill which requires only a strong sense of the needs of a team while managing their skill sets and deadlines. I can promise you that management is not anywhere close to that kind of mental drain; as I've been (and still am) on both sides of that fence right now. Strong management is about being proactive and making sure your team has the tools to make the game happen. It's about putting your best foot forward and finding the strong suits of your team and putting them where they'll make the largest impact on the project.
I hate to break it to you, but no one that you manage will ever tell you that your idea of 10hr days is a bad one. It's like telling your wife that her dress makes her look fat and wonder why she got mad at you. 10hr work days (without the compensation of a Friday off) is the giant elephant in the room, and likely the topic of discussion among your staff during those lunch breaks that you are not invited to. I don't mean to sound harsh, I'm just painting a picture here. No hard feelings.
Again, crunch time is not the devil, but long and unrewarded crunch time is only going to make you look good to your boss and make you the enemy of ever person underneath you. It's a question of whether you want to look out for #1 or the greater good. It's not an easy question to answer; either one is perfectly acceptable, depending on who you talk to.
1) the person who's mortgage is above there pay rate.
Or
2) the guy trying to afford a expensive "habit".