When asked “How long will it take to accomplish X?” the most common answer will be given under the assumption that when you work on X you’ll never encounter hard-to-identify bugs, that the requirements of X won’t change, and that some obscure hardware problem won’t eat up a bunch of your time.
#CAPTAIN CRUNCH HORROR GAME SOFTWARE#
It happens in all kinds of software development.
Scheduling isn’t just a problem in videogames. If we were willing to delay our own payday to make the game we wanted, how much easier do you think it is to push for more features when you’re not the one who will have to bear the direct financial consequences? And none of us were getting paid until the game was done. Good Robot shipped about four months later than we planned, because we had more features we wanted to add. Not because they’re stupid or irresponsible, but because they really love games and want to make this one really good.
And it’s not because management is a bunch of soulless meanies who want to work our poor developers to death I mean, management might still be soulless meanies, but not for this reason. Sadly, I don’t think that’s a fair expectation at all. This led to some people asking, “Why is crunch even a thing?” Can’t management just plan the schedule so that the project is done on time using only 40 hour work weeks? Last week I derided permacrunch – the policy of working an entire creative team 70 hours a week all the time – as “the policy of simpletons and sociopaths”.
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