There was a time a few months ago when I was writing more than once a week, when my new weekly article Shut Up and Play this was just that: a weekly, and I proudly posted the publicity Mass Effect 2 was getting and the games I was playing.
Then BAM, a deadline looms like Damocles’ knife.
It’s hard to explain to someone not in this or another entertainment-based industry what it’s like doing crunch. In many ways it is the same as any other deadline in any other office: you work until it’s done. But the difference is that in the game industry, while you’re putting in the extra hours, balancing stress with productivity, while you’re feeling beaten down with no end in sight you fight with the fact that you are making games. How can you feel beaten down if you’re making games for a living?
So I’ve been doing what’s called crunching off and on for the last month and it hit stride last week. But crunch at BioWare, and specifically on Mass Effect 2, is a different beast than what I’m used to. It’s been mostly voluntary for not only me but for everyone (meaning I’ve chosen to stay at work to get stuff done as opposed to someone else telling me I have to stay to get stuff done, or staying at work to get stuff done because I have to make an entire sequel in 6 months). But everyone’s work is coming along amazingly. You’re in for a real treat.
Crunch is a very strange beast and one that doesn’t exist solely in the games industry. My wife works for the provincial government here in Alberta and sometimes she’ll have to spend a few hours after work to get things done, or spend a week of long hours (though that is very rare). The film industry has been doing it for a while and I think that the games industry thinks that it is like the film industry. And in some ways that’s not incorrect: a creative industry requires whatever you have to bring to the table to make the product the best product it can be. So sometimes extra time is required to get to that gold standard.
Is Crunch a sign of bad scheduling? Sometimes: I’ve experienced that on 2 of my projects not at BioWare. Poor planning for either the department you are in, or a department that impacts you can cause unwanted long hours. And sometimes, the worst kind of Crunch is when it is dictated by production: you must stay because other members of your time must stay. You begin, in those situations, to not only dislike the project, but those people who are having to stay late, whether or not it is justified.
Sometimes, and I mean this with as straight a face as I can, that it’s done out of love. No shitting. We crunched on Cel Damage because for most of us it was our first game, it was a launch game for the original Xbox, and we wanted it to be the best it could be. There was a bit of ‘OMGOMGOMG we’ve run out of time for this level! Crapcrapcrapcrap!’ going on, but also there were many late hours trying to get the population just right on the Junk Yard level so it’s the most fun; or spending several 17 hour shifts trying to get cartoon trees to look just right. The same can be said about Mass Effect 2: everyone is putting the hours in to make it the absolute best it can be. The difference is that the Mass Effect 2 team is comprised of seasoned veterans and on Cel Damage we really had no idea what the fuck we were doing.
In the next part I’ll talk about some of the ways I get through Crunch.
