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With all the talk about crunch happening now, I ( @SmashyNick) would like to share our studio's experiences with crunch as I think the more devs that are transparent about it, the less will have to learn it the hard way.
You guys might know that before Caelan and I started Aggro Crab we made a little game called Treadnauts, a local multiplayer party game, think Towerfall but with flying tanks. We were working on this as our first big game out of college (Caelan actually dropped out to do so)
Being the young upstarts that we were, we had seemingly endless energy to crunch. Until....we didn't. Before we went into early access, we crunched for about a month straight to get everything ready (also I lied earlier, it has online multiplayer for PC & Caelan had to code it)
We were pulling 12 hour days, 6 days a week, for over a month. Our futures seemingly relied on this game putting us on the map. What started out as character-building bootstrapping ended up hurting us physically, mentally, and in relationships were spending less and less time in.
I can't speak for Caelan but that experience kinda FUCKED me up, as in: I can't crunch anymore if I tried. At the ripe old age of 25 it's infinitely harder to work long hours, not even on things I'd consider "passion work" as opposed to crunch because my brain conflates the two.
Because of that, we....didn't crunch nearly as much on Going Under, which in a roundabout way was good! But on any project there are bumps in the road, so it didn't go away entirely. When we did crunch, we felt the drain of it way more strongly than we used to.
On occasion, we & some team members had to work late, usually the night before a milestone build, but we tried our best to make sure they were comfortable with it. Nothing is more wack than forcing others to crunch, so our solution would usually be taking on more work ourselves.
Self-imposed crunch happened to us, and we don't have anyone to blame but ourselves for it. Irresponsible scope creep and poor self-discipline caused me to really hurt myself and burn the fuck out. Was it worth it? Probably not, Treadnauts was just the one stepping stone.
Crunch is something that every developer has to confront. Thankfully there are industry role models like Supergiant that can show us all a better way is possible, but the rest of us are merely trying our best and unfortunately sometimes fail. https://kotaku.com/the-secret-to-the-success-of-bastion-pyre-and-hades-1838082618
Moving forward I want to work toward an Aggro Crab where crunch is managed better. Pitch a game with reasonable scope, budget, and timeline. Hire a producer to keep us accountable. Maybe one day I'll be able to burn the midnight oil devving again and actually feel good about it.
