(This post is for all the family and friends who were puzzled by my near-disappearance during August and September. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d be busy at work for a few weeks!).

For the majority of video game developers, end of project overtime (a.k.a crunch-time) is the near-inevitable tradeoff we accept for an interesting and generally fun job. And like the Curb Your Enthusiasm sketch about Hodgkin’s disease, there are both ’good’ and ‘bad’ varieties of crunch-time. 

Good crunch comes close to the end of the project. There are X number of bugs preventing you shipping and the end is in sight. Another form of good crunch would be working overtime to make that last-minute-yet-terrific tweak, or polishing up the latest E3/Press/Cover-Disc demo that will be seen by thousands.

Bad crunch is very different. 

Bad crunch can be summed up as the “oh fuck” phase of a project or milestone, the time where it’s discovered the amount of outstanding work exceeds the time remaining. In addition, while working on features that have not yet been completed (or started!), special care must be taken as the amount of QA time they will receive before release can vary from weeks to hours. 

The causes of bad crunch and how they can be avoided deserve an entire post to themselves. However, since I’ve only recently finished my latest bout of crunch I’ll save that post till I’m feeling a little more objective :)  Instead, here are 10 of the things I most dislike about crunch-time in the games industry..

  1. The final deadline is never really the final deadline, at least not at first. Attempting to guess the real deadline becomes a game of cat and mouse between the developer and the publisher.
  2. Your daily diet consists of cheap takeaway food, constrained to a few repeating varieties. To this day, certain Indian dishes bring back haunting memories of summer 2004.
  3. Life begins to resemble Groundhog Day, sans humour and Andi McDowell. While Bill Murray learnt to play the piano, your only gain will be carpal tunnel syndrome.
  4. Because the majority of games target the holiday season crunch-time, annoyingly, coincides with the last few months of summer. (We work on video games people, we don’t get enough sun as it is!)
  5. You wake up one morning and realize you’re out of fresh laundry
  6. You wake up the next morning and realize you’re still out of fresh laundry.
  7. Consumption of Coffee/Coke/Red-Bull increase to dangerous levels. Unofficial competitions begin to see who can brew the strongest, yet still drinkable, coffee. 
  8. Some team members begin to develop an irrational dislike for the publisher in general, and the publishers QA team in particular.
  9. During the final month (or months), various team members will be sporadically struck by day-long bouts of unfounded optimism and utter phrases such as “we’re nearly there”, or “one last push!”. The rest of the team will take time out of bug-fixing to plot their painful deaths.
  10. After crunch is over, you still have submission to contend with.