Thanks for cross-quoting my post
Kyuuji - I can give a bit more context here for those who think they still need to defend crunch "rationally". Heart goes out to
Xaszatm too.
These kind of crunch situations inflict trauma. When that trauma meets ignorance then we're in trouble.
Hope we can see those who have obviously lived through the trauma of crunch-culture to have a voice in this thread again soon.
Back to the REALITY of crunch (devs and QA testers, please add to this from your experience. This was mine):
Love and Pride go to die in Crunch
During crunch you will start to hate your work. Your love for the "product" will die. I am being very general here, because I am confident that if you look at the work that typically falls into crunch-time is this: fixing bugs.
What does bug fixing entail?
- Finding bugs (QA testers creating these reports for devs to address them)
- Fixing bugs
- Retesting
- Hoping it worked
If we assume a year of crunch for a typical open-world AAA game, you will fix three classes of bugs.
Class A: Game breaking (i.e. hard crashes)
Class B: Progress halting (i.e. user has to restart to progress and similar)
Class C: Cosmetic (i.e. missing textures, etc)
There is of course overlap - like missing collision (meaning player can walk through walls, which might be Class C or can be upped to B as well).
All classes of bugs will be worked on within the first 3 quarters. C-class bugs fall away eventually, leaving time to focus down on Class-A and B.
IMPORTANT:
The aim here is usually not to create something you're "proud" of, but to pass Sony's, Microsoft's QA tests, so they give the green light to publish. If there's still a class A bug somewhere obvious, your game will not be released - a day 1 patch can salvage that situation, though nowadays.
Back when I was still working in the industry, most copies were physical and an internet connection wasn't taken as a given.
All we dreamed of was passing Sony's & Microsoft's scrutiny to give the green light. If their QA team fails the build due to a bug that was your responsibility - well, HAVE FUN WITH THAT FEELING.
---
Real World example of a bug fixing process from the Witcher 3 (found on
Kotaku):
Problem
CD Projekt Red realized that something was horribly wrong: They could walk into any house in the game—even the ones that were meant to be part of the scenery.
Source
The Witcher 3 was supposed to lock all of the doors for the duration of the quest, and then, once the quest was over, unlock those doors once again. Problem was, as Miles Tost recalled, the game had no way of knowing which doors had been open before the quest and which ones had been locked. So it would just open everything.
Fix
Tost said. "And I remember the solution for this was quite bitter—the quest designer had to actually go through every single door in the game and add this tag. 'This is a door that was closed before, and it should be closed again after.'"
So, the thing you are supposed to LOVE and feel PRIDE in demands you to sit 12 hours + in front of and do stuff like:
- Adding Tags to Game Objects
- Moving Collision Boxes of Game Objects
- Aligning UV maps
- Touch up textures
- Fix character rigs
- Amend geometry (and re-do UV maps)
- Fix LOD objects
Those tasks come out of a database by the way, filled up daily by overworked QA testers, who start hating you for dismissing bugs you can't simply be bothered with, or a QA tester is at the end of a 12 hour minimum-wage, no-bonus shift of checking the fucking collision of doors, or alignment of textures and can't for the life of them write a report that makes any kind of sense.
--> SET TO FIXED (and hope it doesn't come back)
Also the fun of fixing strings is a delight every kid dreams of when wanting to go into game development. So much pride in opening up that CSV file and fixing a typo. DREAM BIG, KIDS.
Add to this the pressures of non-crunch life. Are you a woman / queer / black / neuro-divergent? Being that makes CRUNCH so much more fun, as the game industry is a wonderfully progressive place for sexual harassers, racists and bigots. And they love punching down.
Also, do you have a family that actually dares to depend on you for a couple of hours of their lives? Well, fuck you. Don't you love the product? Don't you take pride in moving those collision boxes on the Y-axis?
The love felt when arguing with a QA tester whether a game object's broken geometry is "as designed" or not, just for the heck of it. LOVELY.
Just to say it again: crunch is not a creative process. It is dedicated to making your game passable as a sell-able product with pressure from the company to make it work... or else!
Oh oh oh, if you cannot make it work, think of the stock prices! Also, there's always that big publisher who might just buy us... and then what? More crunch! No more free pizzas for those 12 hour shifts!
And lastly:
Yes, there are people who love everything I have listed above. And that's fair. I appreciate well-kept spreadsheets like any other German would. The people that I know who love that type of stuff usually really don't care for the product. They just love game engines and moving things about incrementally and can do that non-stop. Some of them don't even play games. Some do, but only Eve online.
What I am saying is: There is no specific company-boy / girl who thrives in crunch just because "it's what needs to be done". They are also specific people with specific circumstances.
Okay, that's me for the day talking about crunch.
Unionise, people. Solidarity in suffering to push back.
