Revisting IGDA’s Twitter account on Quality of Life (including crunch), it seems to have gone the way of the Dodo: Perhaps they’ve been too busy? Well, the Twitter About line proclaims: This is the IGDA’s Quality of Life Special Interest Group twitter page. This page is updated by @twistededge. For comparison, as of this writing, [...more...]
Valve’s Employee Handbook wavers on CrunchFrom Valve, the makers of … well, rather a lot of acclaimed, massively profitable, hit games (Half Life, Portal, Left 4 Dead) … This was leaked/posted widely last week: Valve’s new “Employee Handbook”. (although “leak” is probably the wrong word – it’s part of a wave of “Valve is a great place to work” events [...more...] |
Games journalists don’t want to work in games – because of crunch“Ben Kuchera has thought about at length. “I’ve been told that people who write about the business all want to be developers and make games,” he told me. “It couldn’t be any less true. We get to tour these studios and see how the people who make the games live. They seem to always be [...more...] |
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In praise of the 40-hour work week (via salon.com)A great – detailed – article looking at the 100-year-history of the working week, and trying to understand why and how it works. Well worth reading through, but here’s some hilights: Single easiest, fastest thing to boost profits “it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to [...more...] |
Thoughts on Crunch: Causes of Mandatory CrunchThis post, in it’s entirety, can also be found on my blog: Jeff On Games The post is part of a series: Part 1: Types of Crunch Everyone looks at crunch as a failure of management. I agree, but there are a lot more factors to it than that. Here, in my mind are the [...more...] |
Thoughts on Crunch: Types of CrunchThis post, in it’s entirety, can also be found on my blog: Jeff On Games Because crunch has been in the news so often again recently, I figured I’d share some of my thoughts and see what people think. As a disclaimer, I have never gone through what anyone would call a “death march,” which [...more...] |
The Darkness 2: AAA game built with low crunchThe Darkness 2 (360, PS3, and PC) – 80% Metacritic – no detail on exactly what the crunch was like, but it’s couched in refreshing terms: “Let’s open with a bold statement: Darkness 2 has been the best managed project I have seen in my 10 years in the industry. It’s a 3 platform (simultaneous [...more...] |
The Problems With Crunching (Steven Goodwin)Satirical look at the realities of Crunch in game dev. Some excerpts: One big advantage of less spare time (or ‘downtime’, as I know hear people saying) is that developers have less time to question their motives at work. If they had time to think, most developers would realise that their entire life – morning, [...more...] |
Crunch in AAA games: Kameo and Viva PinataGuest Post: Andy Patrick Recently I was asked the question, “is crunch necessary to produce a AAA game?” My response is very simple: “No, and I know this for a fact.” I know this, because I have done it, and if you’re interested I’d like to share with you what I did. It’s a story [...more...] |
IGDA Quality of Life team starts a Twitter AccountHopefully, they will do good with this. In the first 6 weeks, they’ve managed four links about QoL, and 8 non-QoL tweets, not bad. I’m not sure what “a list of game developers who use Twitter” has to do with QoL, but fingers crossed it’s a precursor to something useful: https://twitter.com/#!/IGDAQOL Tweet This Post |
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