Fixing Crunch In The Video Game Industry By Planning Better
In this week’s blog post I would like to discuss one of the areas that causes crunch in the video game industry as well as my proposed solution for it. If you didn’t know already, game development is very difficult to predict. This largely stems from the fact that it is almost impossible to know how long a task or feature is going to take to implement. It’s something that you might be able to get good at, but also something that you can never truly perfect.
As a producer, communicating with team members and discussing task estimates and potential risks that they might encounter and how to account for those risks is how we can prevent future struggle, a.k.a crunch. Of course, even if time estimates are discussed and confirmed and everything seems to be accounted for, there are unforeseen circumstances bound to occur that just cannot be predicted. Even so, as a producer, discussing contingencies and estimates with team members as well as stakeholders is very important to ensure a smooth production process.
Proper delivery goals
When it comes to setting deadline goals for each phase of development, I believe that it is important to take into account the thoughts and recommendations of the team for the project. Once the project has been analyzed by the team and the objectives are made clear, an evaluation should be done in order to gauge the amount of time team members believe it will take to complete the features that encompass the game. The mitigation here is ensuring everyone agrees upon the deadline goals and are accountable for their estimates, basically making a promise to the team so that things get done on time. I think that the subject matter experts actually working on the project know better than anyone in regard to how long things will take to complete, and judging by their analysis, a proper schedule can be crafted.
Misplanning leads to pain
In an article written by Tommy Delp titled Crunch Culture: How Game Development Becomes Toxic it is stated that “in most cases, it’s misplanning that creates crunch. When planning isn’t done properly, employees will have to crunch because of that”. In a situation like this, due to misplanning, employees have to put in extra hours and crunch in order to make up for planning mistakes. In game development, things don’t always go as planned, but there should be some sort of backup or plan B in case things go awry.
During development on a game, my team member had personal issues arise which resulted in them being unable to work on the game for a period of time. The mitigation for this was handing off some of the work to another team member that didn’t have a heavy workload to compensate for that member being out.
As mentioned earlier, it’s important to account for the unaccountable. It may sound ridiculous, but it can potentially be the difference in making the team crunch or not.
Wrapping up
Planning is one of the most important facets in game development. Setting proper deadline goals and accounting for the unaccountable can pave the way to a healthier schedule for everyone working on the project. It isn’t the aspect that causes crunch, but it is definitely one of the most salient.
What do you think about this crunch mitigation strategy? Please leave a comment and share your opinion!
For next week, I’ll be covering the importance of team size in game development.
