Developers come clean about the realities of crunch

- Developer Tanya X. Short rails against how crunch seems to be ingrained in game development culture.

Crunch time, once a romanticized aspect of game development culture, seems to be losing its lustre as more developers come around to the fact that crunching doesn't make you a better person and it might actually make your game worse. There's even a "Crunch is Failure" form developers can sign to take a public stand against the culture.

But many people who play games don't know much about crunch culture, and now Kotaku has published a thorough feature aimed at exposing it to a broader audience. It's worth your time to read, as it incorporates commentary and personal stories from a broad swathe of game developers who spent time in studios were crunch was regularly requested and expected.

"By the third week of working there, I had noticed that I [had] never seen certain team members leave the office ever," artist Clarke Nordhauser told Kotaku, recalling his time last year at a AAA studio in the midst of a big project. "You enter a certain point of depression where a process is comforting, and once I’d felt like another cog I just accepted this as my fate."

Nordhauser left that position after four months, and told Kotaku that "until there is some sort of union for game developers, I probably won’t find myself working in the industry again."

Kitfox Games director and occasional Gamasutra contributor Tanya X. Short pops up in the feature to advocate against "pointless, burn-out crunch, which if you’re lucky will only leave you sick (physically or creatively)... and if you’re unlucky will make you miss your milestone, get sick, and start you down a path towards bad production practices."

Other developers crop up in the feature to talk about why they and their studios crunch, and how it makes them feel.

"The only way to finish is to crunch," Flying Helmet Games co-founder Edward Douglas told Kotaku, referring to his studio's debut RPG Eon Altar. "To ask people who did not commit to the features in the game to spend the evenings, their weekend, their family time, digging us out of this ‘technical debt’ we’ve incurred...it’s the absolute worst position to put someone in and it’s shameful that I did it."

The lengthy feature is worth reading in full over on Kotaku.