Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Snickers


Crunch time
.

Know this much, ye who seek employ at a videogame development company: You will inevitably be called upon to sacrifice many, many hours in order to provide the masses with digital interactive distractions. Forget your aches and pains, forget your extended commute, forget all matters of body and mind.

This is not a complaint, but a warning. Not even much of a warning, more like a heads-up.

Be prepared.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As I understand it, for most software projects crunch time is a week, two weeks--maybe a month. At one particularly bad client (who we had to sue in order to be paid--I contract/consult), we had two week crunch times before each presentation to a potential customer, and we had presentations every two or three weeks. But then, the client wanted the entire application redesigned for each presentation as a complete and working app rather than a canned demo. Is there any question why that client is not in business today? I digress.

I'm used to crunches, even the little ones that have to fit into a 40 hour billable week. From what I've heard, crunch time on a game can be anywhere from one month, to six, to eighteen. It's gotta be a labor of love, because it certainly isn't, erm, professional, if you will. (And believe me, I'll almost never blame the devs.)

Anonymous said...

My opinion: if your schedule absolutely /depends/ on a crunch longer than a month, something is very, very wrong.