While i havent played it yet, I have noticed on Metacritic that Silent Hill Origins is getting some pretty good reviews from the press.

What’s never mentioned is that the team at Climax UK did the whole game in around 12 months, after inheriting it from the previous team who’d wasted a year of development. I saw that teams effort and it wasn’t pretty. There was really nothing in the way of code, art, or even design that was worth salvaging.

That the team in the UK not only managed to turn out a worthy entry in the Silent Hill series, but did so in a year is truly impressive.

Kudos guys, kudos.

(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. 

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