The problem of crunch time in game development

Quote from Skjalg

And thats something you cant deal with with a full week of preparation for the upcoming no talk thursday? really?

You cant even work on something different for 4 hours?

Considering the vast majority of a designers time is waiting for people to fix features/tools so they can actually implement stuff, no. Seriously the whole no talk thursday is probably one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. Replacing face to face talks with IM is one of the biggest problems with communication within a company.

I get so many people talking to me by IM asking questions that without looking at the issue I can't answer nor explain over an IM. They end up wasting a whole 15-20 minutes of my time rather than talking to me at my or their machine and solving the issue in 5 minutes.

Yes in that case it sucks Vilham, but then you probably have 200 cases of people asking something which could be answered with a yes or no over IM, without interupting you. Those are the annoying ones IMO.

Quote from Vilham

And thats something you cant deal with with a full week of preparation for the upcoming no talk thursday? really?

You cant even work on something different for 4 hours?

Considering the vast majority of a designers time is waiting for people to fix features/tools so they can actually implement stuff, no. Seriously the whole no talk thursday is probably one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. Replacing face to face talks with IM is one of the biggest problems with communication within a company.

I get so many people talking to me by IM asking questions that without looking at the issue I can't answer nor explain over an IM. They end up wasting a whole 15-20 minutes of my time rather than talking to me at my or their machine and solving the issue in 5 minutes.

We're driving into maybe land here, but maybe the features you are waiting for to be fixed would be fixed if you had no-talk thursdays?

I spend almost 30 minutes before I delve into the groove where I can code really effectively. And if I am alloved to code straight for even 3 hours without any interruptions like IM/mail/people knocking at my office door then I can produce so much more than a whole week filled with interruptions.

The whole point im trying to get across here is that pestering people with "hey have you fixed problem/feature/tool x so that i can work on task y" will not make things go faster, it will have the opposite effect. Which is why a no-talk thursday is a good idea. Pester your coders on thursday mornings and let them work thursday aftersnoons. Its not that bad to leave someone alone for 3~4 hours one day per week. Remember that when a coder have to reply to 12938429083742934 of these pesterings every day he gets no work done.

or maybe what you're really saying is that you got hired to pester the coders so that no work gets done and you really dont want to lose your job hahahaha ;D

I usually wait to compile a big list of bugs before I go pester the programmer I'm working with. I know that they need their focus time and if I just asked for a major feature I'll try to leave him to do his thing. Unless it's some no-show bug that is completely preventing me from working on the game.

Same thing goes for the artists. I try to compile a list of bugs or improvements and talk to them every now and then instead of cropping up at their desk at every second. I will usually come to the team with small requests once in the morning and then two times in the afternoon. I also try to never ask for them to do anything after 5:00, since I don't want to come up to you at 15:40 when you are getting ready to finish your work and ask for a new feature for today.

When the management comes up with crazy requests, there's nothing I can do other than try to distill the request in sizable and comprehensible chunks that can be completed one at a time.

It has worked quite well, we manage to keep a good amount of communication with the minimal "pestering" of the people involved. I especially like the new approach to documenting we are using, a modified version of the game design logs proposed by danC. With this I usually log in the requests as I go, then once I have enough of them, I'll go to the person and explain/discuss the issues to come up with the most feasible way to complete the tasks. In the meantime, if they finish whatever they are doing and check the logs, they can come to me for clarification.

Quote from Skjalg

And thats something you cant deal with with a full week of preparation for the upcoming no talk thursday? really?

You cant even work on something different for 4 hours?

Considering the vast majority of a designers time is waiting for people to fix features/tools so they can actually implement stuff, no. Seriously the whole no talk thursday is probably one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. Replacing face to face talks with IM is one of the biggest problems with communication within a company.

I get so many people talking to me by IM asking questions that without looking at the issue I can't answer nor explain over an IM. They end up wasting a whole 15-20 minutes of my time rather than talking to me at my or their machine and solving the issue in 5 minutes.

We're driving into maybe land here, but maybe the features you are waiting for to be fixed would be fixed if you had no-talk thursdays?

I spend almost 30 minutes before I delve into the groove where I can code really effectively. And if I am alloved to code straight for even 3 hours without any interruptions like IM/mail/people knocking at my office door then I can produce so much more than a whole week filled with interruptions.

The whole point im trying to get across here is that pestering people with "hey have you fixed problem/feature/tool x so that i can work on task y" will not make things go faster, it will have the opposite effect. Which is why a no-talk thursday is a good idea. Pester your coders on thursday mornings and let them work thursday aftersnoons. Its not that bad to leave someone alone for 3~4 hours one day per week. Remember that when a coder have to reply to 12938429083742934 of these pesterings every day he gets no work done.

or maybe what you're really saying is that you got hired to pester the coders so that no work gets done and you really dont want to lose your job hahahaha ;D

Your pretty much agreeing with me there, I said earlier that if its not important you shouldn't be there, reminding someone isn't important as it is their responsibility to remember and get it done. Telling them of a new bug that stops your work dead is a good reason to interupt someone.

Quote from Vilham

bla bla bla

bipedi bla bla

We're driving into maybe land here, but maybe the features you are waiting for to be fixed would be fixed if you had no-talk thursdays?

I spend almost 30 minutes before I delve into the groove where I can code really effectively. And if I am alloved to code straight for even 3 hours without any interruptions like IM/mail/people knocking at my office door then I can produce so much more than a whole week filled with interruptions.

The whole point im trying to get across here is that pestering people with "hey have you fixed problem/feature/tool x so that i can work on task y" will not make things go faster, it will have the opposite effect. Which is why a no-talk thursday is a good idea. Pester your coders on thursday mornings and let them work thursday aftersnoons. Its not that bad to leave someone alone for 3~4 hours one day per week. Remember that when a coder have to reply to 12938429083742934 of these pesterings every day he gets no work done.

or maybe what you're really saying is that you got hired to pester the coders so that no work gets done and you really dont want to lose your job hahahaha ;D

Your pretty much agreeing with me there, I said earlier that if its not important you shouldn't be there, reminding someone isn't important as it is their responsibility to remember and get it done. Telling them of a new bug that stops your work dead is a good reason to interupt someone.

No, because this is where I dont agree with you. You dont go and tell your programmer about a new bug when you find it, you file it in the bug tracking system so that the programmer can look at it when he has the time. If people ran to me every time they found a bug I'd delete the bug tracking system and rename my position from programmer to bug tracker.

Also, even if you dont have a bug tracker, and you live in a world where programmers are supposed to remember every bug, but they dont, so you need to remind them. it probably wouldnt hurt to not bother them half a day per week. on a company-wide basis

Pretty much the last person I will poke in a work day is a programmer, they can't just whip a change or fix in (usually) and they often have an extremely efficient bug/feature tracking. Content creators however do need to be very flexible and work extremely closely as a team - yes you could ask on messenger, but if it requires more than a simple yes or no answer your wasting everyone's time

I tend to slap programming questions in after work when we're grabbing a few beers

I think you are talking about two different things. Skjalg, I think you mean bug as in "the font color is wrong" and vilham means "holy god everything is crashing, I am useless". If the former version pops up, ignore it until the 0 day patch. If the latter occurs, give the programmer sensual backrubs until he fixes it.

Hehe no I'm not confusing those two, insta

If the font colour is wrong, post it on the bug tracker if its not already there.

If the game wont start up and gives you a weird error, then post it on the bug tracker if its not already there, except this time you can use that nifty litle drop down where it sais "URGENT" or "CODE RED" or "VOLATILE" or whatever your bug tracking software uses for "FIX THE FUCK NOW".

Also, if its the latter, and the game is not working at all, its probably already being worked on by 12 monkeys in the basement already and have been all night because the coders have probably noticed themselves. ;D

edit;

I fully endorse the beer-problem solving!

So your saying you don't want to talk to people but you still regularly check your email and bugs? Sounds rather contradictory to me (and doesn't sound like what most programmers do, if I don't personally ask for a fix in person you can bet im going to be waiting several weeks at which point its a bit late). If the tools/game are broken so that I can't work whatever other feature you may be making is at that point irrelivent. If I can't do my work anyway then what is the point in making a new feature?

Anyway remind me how we got off on this tangent

Quote from Gloglebag

Why doesn't the government enforce the fucking laws then. the solution is not overtime, it's giving devs more time.

In the UK we have similar laws but the contract you sign says you'll do the extra hours free.

And if you're a designer it can often say that anything you create or even think up in your free time is owned by the company.

I love contracts.

Quote from Taylor

And if you're a designer it can often say that anything you create or even think up in your free time is owned by the company.

I love contracts.

Same thing with engineering... I have ideas, just don't write them down

Quote from Vilham

So your saying you don't want to talk to people but you still regularly check your email and bugs? Sounds rather contradictory to me (and doesn't sound like what most programmers do, if I don't personally ask for a fix in person you can bet im going to be waiting several weeks at which point its a bit late). If the tools/game are broken so that I can't work whatever other feature you may be making is at that point irrelivent. If I can't do my work anyway then what is the point in making a new feature?Anyway remind me how we got off on this tangent

Hehe we got off on this tangent when I posted the ted talk about how to get work done

I'm not saying that we should take everything to extremes here and that most coders prefer to be left alone in their caves, never to be bothered. I usually check my mail pretty often, but the key thing to notice here is that I check them when it fits me. There is nothing worse when being really deep into your code, thinking about methods here, classes there and be really into something only to be disturbed because someone is asking you what your progress is on that very thing you are working on. The problem with people showing up at my doorstep every time there is something wrong is that they usually come at times when it doesnt fit me. I know it sounds very bad, and not very social, but consider the fact that it takes me 20~30 minutes in order to pick up where I left off after we've had our conversation. So even if your problem is very little, it will usually grab 30 minutes out of my time that wasnt necessary. And that is 30 minutes I could have spent fixing that one thing you are at my doorstep to complain about.

Think of it like reading a book, only every time you leave it you dont have a bookmark. You just close the book and think about somethign else. Then a few days later you open the book again and try to find where you left off; you'll most likely remember that you were somewhere in the middle of the book, but not the exact page number so you quickly start reading the first sentence on every page that you have read before to get back to where you left off, then you encounter a page that you didnt quite remember and all of a sudden you have read a few complete pages only to realise you've read this part and the search continutes for about 20~30 minutes before you are at the point where you originally left off. This is essentially wasted time.

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People say you have to have a lot a passion for what your doing, and it's totally true. The reason is, because it's so hard, that if you don't, any rational person will give up.

I believe this kinda fits what we're discussing here and the so called-crunch time, when people whine about it, what they are doing really is giving up, because they're sane, like jobs say; so I don't blame them, their fighting for their right to have a life outside work.

Game Development is not "making bread" industry, you do need to love what you do It's a creative driven industry. (duh) It's not a normal job, or it shouldn't be, I don't think you can live a normal life (9 to 5) working on games and be successful at that, and if you are trying to do that, you can probably do it, but you'll just lag behind. (I'm aware there are some exceptions though)

Some might be ok for being another brick in the wall, other's are here to make a difference, I'll go for the latter.

On the other hand, I hope this post didn't come out wrong, I don't condone mandatory crunch-time. People have to have the right of choice, what R* did to RDR team for instance, is just plain WRONG treating their employees like Chinese underclass workers. So I guess that goes to show, be careful on the companies you pick to work for, and crunch for.

And if a publisher or company wants me to just crunch for the sake of just shipping Call of Duty sequel number XX on the 11th of November every year, they can suck my big black Portuguese cock, that's not why I got into games.

Quote from Skjalg

bla bla bla

bipedi bla bla

We're driving into maybe land here, but maybe the features you are waiting for to be fixed would be fixed if you had no-talk thursdays?

I spend almost 30 minutes before I delve into the groove where I can code really effectively. And if I am alloved to code straight for even 3 hours without any interruptions like IM/mail/people knocking at my office door then I can produce so much more than a whole week filled with interruptions.

The whole point im trying to get across here is that pestering people with "hey have you fixed problem/feature/tool x so that i can work on task y" will not make things go faster, it will have the opposite effect. Which is why a no-talk thursday is a good idea. Pester your coders on thursday mornings and let them work thursday aftersnoons. Its not that bad to leave someone alone for 3~4 hours one day per week. Remember that when a coder have to reply to 12938429083742934 of these pesterings every day he gets no work done.

or maybe what you're really saying is that you got hired to pester the coders so that no work gets done and you really dont want to lose your job hahahaha ;D

Your pretty much agreeing with me there, I said earlier that if its not important you shouldn't be there, reminding someone isn't important as it is their responsibility to remember and get it done. Telling them of a new bug that stops your work dead is a good reason to interupt someone.

No, because this is where I dont agree with you. You dont go and tell your programmer about a new bug when you find it, you file it in the bug tracking system so that the programmer can look at it when he has the time. If people ran to me every time they found a bug I'd delete the bug tracking system and rename my position from programmer to bug tracker.

Also, even if you dont have a bug tracker, and you live in a world where programmers are supposed to remember every bug, but they dont, so you need to remind them. it probably wouldnt hurt to not bother them half a day per week. on a company-wide basis

This does touch on an issue that I think is often at the root of why crunch is so often resorted to: incredibly bad management of resources, time, and people.

It seems that a lot of people in the games industry — including those doing the managing — have absolutely no idea how to manage time efficiently. We face very similar issues in the web industry (where fortunately production times are smaller), and the thing that pushes projects beyond deadlines time after time is people being distracted from what they need to do and everyone's time not being managed well.

For example one person might have a show-stopping problem and will go bother other people to sort it out so they can continue with their work, but the person they bother might have other people waiting on them too, and they might be engrossed in something which needs serious concentration, and they might have milestones hinging on them completing what they're doing. So while it might make sense to fix that oh-so important issue right then (and often when another staff member is pressuring them they'll oblige), this causes all sorts of issues. When this is happening every day of every week it mounts up to a serious loss of time. Small interruptions might seem minor but they kill productivity like mofos. I personally really lose my flow when I'm bothered about little issues.

Where I work the solution was to bring in new directors and managers who are intimately experienced with running efficient companies, and while their strategies initially clashed with the easy-going nature of designers and programmers it's meant that deadlines are missed much less often. For example, programmers are no longer allowed to harass designers because they need something doing — they have to go through project managers, who schedule it in a way that's going to be best for the overall project. If it has to be fixed right then so the programmer can continue, fine. If it's going to be less damaging for the programmer to wait and maybe do something else if possible, that's the way it goes. Not an easy job but it saves bucketloads of time.

Of course I don't work in all these crunching game studios so I can't say what exactly leads to the problems, but I know the above has always been the biggest factor (of several) where I've worked. I don't think it's a coincidence that a lack of management/leadership aptitude and a company full of computer geeks who worked their way into their various management positions through longevity go hand-in-hand.

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":qs0asdbr]I believe this kinda fits what we're discussing here and the so called-crunch time, when people whine about it, what they are doing really is giving up, because they're sane, like jobs say; so I don't blame them, their fighting for their right to have a life outside work.

To be honest nothing pisses me more off than rich people talking about these matters. It's easy for them to come up with such phrases. If everyone of us would get fantastic pay and the rewards that a guy like him gets then "passion" would automaticaly be on a whole different level.

The word passion anyway is so often abused in this industry. If you dedicate all your time to something that you love that's not passion that's obsession. And imo that's not healthy.

Jobs made his own wealth, and he took all the risks and had all the passion, so he can talk about that if he wants to.

All the same, passion is one thing, stupidity is another. Work is work and that should be paid regardless of the "passion" you put in.

Having worked at Apple, I can assure you the people putting in the extra effort get compensated very well. With the exception of a few stellar people whom you "have to pay or they'll get a better deal somewhere else", I have yet to see that in the industry.

Thank you Thrik for explaining it so much better than I did, even though I tried 18 times (This is why I didn't become a teacher.)

The second thing I think is slowing games development down is the fact that everyone tries to make and use their own tools. Most people dont really understand the time and complexity that a good and decent tool takes to make. Even something as small as a software that plays music is hard to write correctly. Even though there are basically millions of them, but the vast majority of people only use maybe the top 5 (Spotify, Itunes, winamp etc).

Usually in games production the tools are made and worked upon until they are "working alright (there are known bugs, but the tools does it job if you use it right)", and all the designers and artists needs to learn how to NOT use the tools in order to NOT break them, because the programmers dont have time to fiddle around with the tool as long as its working if you dont fuck it up. Because they have to work on the game now because that has a ship date and the tools dont.

This problem is a huge part of why I love Unity. They are not a game studio, but they are just making the software to make games, and they are just concentrating on this task. I know that some obscure upcoming title isn't going to steal away their focus on Unity3d.

Purchasing an engine is very costly, I know, but there is a reason for that. There are so many that think slapping together an engine is really fast because they have their OpenGL test scene up and runing in no time, but the huge problem isn't the engine itself (even though that is a problem), its all the little tools that make up the asset production itself. All the tools involved from the artists mind into the fully lit and playable scene inside the engine. I cant for the life of me understand why almost every game company out there insists on doing it their own way when there are so many commercially available game engines that can suit their needs.

I can fully understand the need to modify an engine to suit your special games need.

But come on, how engine-special is your game?