palworld being praised for being pokemon but edgy is so funny. as if that isn't the most boring and overdone thing within the pokemon fangame community. in what world is this a revolutionary concept. just go play pokemon reborn or something it's about the same quality (bad) but it's actually free

I don't want the cost of my entertainment to be broken people

I am pretty sure I've made this exact post before but I think it's sooooo funny how much people like to complain about the "don't over-deliver, you're creating patterns" gdc talk while also complaining that the reason destiny 2 is """bad""" now is because they are delivering a consistent level of content that steadily improves instead of every season getting exponentially bigger and better than the last like do you hear yourself bestie

Does crunch affect all team members evenly, or does it affect some more than others? IE Artists do crunch, but they crunch programmers the hardest.

Let's take a step back and consider some context to your question. If there is too much work to do before a deadline, we either have to push the deadline or increase the amount of work done during the time remaining. Let's assume that the deadline is immutable - it's an E3 demo or a hard launch date. If that's the case, we need to increase the amount of work done over time. One way to do that is by crunching. Crunching tends to be more cost-effective than hiring additional workers because it bypasses the usual ramp-up time that new workers need to acclimate and become productive, though it is possible to do both simultaneously.

If you look at crunch as a means to patch a shortfall in total work done, then you should start seeing where and how crunch would affect people. If the environment art team falls significantly behind the combat team, the quest team, the itemization team, and the server team, then the environment art team may be pressured to (or even choose to) crunch to catch up. If a specific feature is behind schedule, the sub-team working on that feature might need to crunch. If the entire game is behind schedule for cert submission, the entire team may have to crunch to hit their ship date.

There is a special time frame in the final stage before certification on console though - when moving toward cert, it is normal that there are certain lockouts that occur in order to maintain stability. Artists and designers are the first to be barred from making any changes that are not explicitly approved by production in order to minimize the chances of something new jeopardizing a cert candidate. This period is called "content freeze" (or "content lock") - no content may be modified or added past that point unless it fixes a cert bug and the producers explicitly ask for it. After "content freeze" comes "code freeze", where even engineers are not allowed to make any changes unless explicitly asked for by production and vetted by the tech leadership. Because of this gap between content and code freeze, engineering (and production) tends to crunch a little longer than everybody else.

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old cookie run crossover events were like what if we did a cute event with a couple of characters each. and new cookie run crossover events are a neverending psychological torture machine created to torment game artists and fans alike

It is quite literally not the fault of consumers pre ordering games that the industry is awful lol what y’all r weird you don’t have to moralize everything people do

Getting real sick of capitalism's insistence that every fucking order needs to be out ON TIME or God help you

the more i read about the game dev industry, the more i feel like i dodged a bullet by dropping out before i ever got there 😭

Gonna need to put Mary Kirby + other long time staff being fired into perspective because this isn't a recent development. Bioware has been plagued with issues for well over a decade, and it's not just because of EA.

When Gaider decided to move on from Dragon Age in 2014, everyone thought it was just because he wanted to move onto a different project. He ended up leaving the company completely in 2016 after working on Anthem for a bit, and it was later reported that staff on the project had issues with his writing. He didn't mention why he left Bioware until very recently in a long twitter thread detailing that, while Bioware is a company known for its storytelling and characters, upper management went from valuing its writers to quietly resenting them, and feeling as though the writing were "holding the company back."

When they started working with Frostbite they encountered so many technical problems with it because it was specifically designed for FPS games. They were literally designing the tools they needed to work on both Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda while they were working on those games. Darrah (or perhaps Laidlaw, I forget which) even acknowledged when he was interviewed by Jason Schreier for Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, that this is a big industry no-no. But Bioware was put in a hard spot to either work with Frostbite or use the Eclipse engine that DAO was designed on (which I'm assuming would've required developing the engine and toolkit further to bring the graphics up to industry standards). So they ended up working with Frostbite which resulted in a fuckton of issues both for Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda, because the teams behind both projects had to design their own tools.

With the added stress of the toolkit also came the toxic work environment, departments that were perpetually understaffed, directors leaving and new writers coming in with different visions for the project, time mismanagement where they spent too much time on "high concept" gameplay, not having a clear vision for the game, resentments between studios, inexperience with coordinating video calls across multiple studios, the resultant mandatory crunch, etc. All of this is mentioned in this article about Mass Effect Andromeda's production cycle and this article about Anthem's.

Casey Hudson and Gérard Lehiany left Bioware in 2014 right in the middle of production on Andromeda (Casey rejoined the company as general manager in 2017, but left again in 2020). David Gaider left in 2016 in the middle of production on Anthem, as did Aaryn Flynn who left before the game was shipped in 2019. Mike Laidlaw left in 2017 and left production of Dragon Age Dreadwolf in Mark Darrah's hands, who left in the middle of its production in 2020. Matt Goldman (creative director for Dreadwolf) left the following year. Mac Walters (production director on Dreadwolf) who's been with the company for over 19 years left in January of this year. Are you seeing the pattern here?

I don't doubt that EA has influence over Bioware considering the recent layoffs appear related to the announcement back in March that EA would lay off 6% of its workforce. But it's clear there's something deeper that's going on at Bioware, and it's really not good.

When veteran senior staff are leaving one by one along with other long time staff, and it's been reported that the studio has a toxic work environment with management issues that make crunch necessary, there is something deeply wrong with the company and how things are being run. This is a sinking ship, and in all likelihood everyone is betting on keeping the company afloat with the success of Dragon Age Dreadwolf and/or the next Mass Effects game.

I want to say something more about how broadly the mainstream AAA video games industry is abusive and how incredibly fucked up their practices of layoffs have been normalized, but this is already pretty long. What I will say is that I'm not claiming this means DA4 or the next ME game is going to tank. It sure as fuck doesn't look good for it, but despite my grievances with Dragon Age, I do want the game to be successful and for Bioware to keep doing what they're doing.

And honestly, whether those games do well or not is really besides the point. Something is wrong at Bioware, whether it's the company itself or the fact it's owned by EA, and it can't be solved with mass layoffs. This is a cultural problem within the company itself, and it's very unlikely to be addressed considering how MEA failing seems to have done little to change how things are being run right now.

GOD THIS PERSON GETS IT!!!

Hello, I am organizing a cozy game jam in my art server! If anyone is interested, please feel free to join. For anyone who doesn't know, a game jam is where a person or group of people work together to make a small game within a set amount of time.

I am aiming for a beginner-friendly jam with resources/help from experienced devs, if someone is new and wants to start out in the gamedev industry, they are very welcome.

No crunch ideally, the jam runs from the 17th November to the 4th of December, meaning there are two full weekends in the jam, for people who have to work fulltime through the week.

The games will be played by myself and the mod team on-stream so nobody's work goes ignored.

There will also be prizes, paid for by myself and through any donations we have received so far.

So yeah feel free to join! I would love to meet everyone and play your games!

Direct link to channel Invite to Cafe Dot

To what degree, do you think, is crunch is done out of malice from management/leaders/stakeholders?

While I cannot say definitively, I would like to believe that there aren't any leaders or managers who actively choose to crunch their workers out of malice, especially because that would mean that they are intentionally trying to harm their workers for some perverse reason. This situation generally can't happen at the dev team level because the team leadership crunches right alongside the rank and file. I would imagine it would require a significant amount of rage to force yourself, as well as many others, to work 60+ hour weeks in order to hurt your enemy on the team. I honestly don't think that malice is a common motivating factor.

Instead, I believe that the primary emotion motivating the call to crunch among leadership is fear. They fear the consequences of missing their deadlines. They fear the consequences of cutting too much content. They fear what might happen to the studio if they can't deliver what they promised. They fear that their jobs might be at risk if they can't finish the game. In order to assuage this fear, they pull out all the stops and order the team to crunch. Their fear leads to desperation, and that desperation is what leads to crunch. 

Once this fear becomes familiar and internalized, crunch becomes just another normal thing that happens when certain conditions are met. That is when crunch becomes crunch culture - it is a core part of the way the studio operates, like having free breakfast cereal at the office and donuts on Fridays. Once that happens, there is no longer any emotion involved at all. Crunch just becomes routine, which is probably the worst possible result.

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What’s your short auto bio?

How did you learn the game making stuff? How do you have time/money? How did you find your style?

oh yeag sure i can give u a lil summary

i wanted to be a game developer my entire life after getting an n64 with zelda and mario when i was like 7 years old

that lead to me taking an experimental 3d course in high school that used blender cuz they had no budget and just used a free program (lucky me that blender eventually turned into the juggernaut that it is now). They didn't have any game design classes but i sated my curiosity by playing games with heavy customization like halo forge and little big planet

in college i took a game design class that introduced me to the Unreal Development Kit (what came before Unreal 4) and, while the classes didn't really teach me much just having access to the engine is what really sparked my drive to start a career in the games industry

few years later I got into the industry during the 'vr is the future lets open up 104599034 game dev studios this bubble totally wont burst' craze of the early - mid 2010's and quickly climbed the ladder due to my skills. on my free time i finished my first self-published game Arcus and released it.

but of course the bubble burst and i got laid off (this coincidentally(?) happened at the same time i came out as trans. lol.) After that I stuck to working indie as, surprise surprise, crunch was a thing at my big industry job. I worked at a few studios for a couple of years, during which bloodborne psx (my second self published indie game) was developed and released on my free time.

all my indie jobs ended with being let go due to the reality of indie development having worse job security. i decided to stop doing "professional" work altogether and became the self publishing indie solo dev that you see today 💙

The longer this workplace abuse situation goes on the less I'm inclined to believe it. At face value it's a very typical development for entertainment companies -- I presume at least some of you know about Telltale Games and Kindly Beast, just to name some -- but the more testimonies that come out the fishier this smells.

We know that there were some bad times during the production of Meta Runner but the given narrative of insanely quick artist turnout and crunch just isn't supported by the actual credits in MD + TADC pilot, which remain consistent and even expand throughout. If there's indeed crunch/a high turnout, it must've then stopped before MD began production or started after TADC's pilot aired, which does not line up with the narrative laid out by the testimonies at all; these suggest years of workplace toxicity and a kind of studio-wide culture change that could not have happened so quickly, all of it made weirder by Kevin Temmer's hiring (who I understand has been through industry abuse/crunch before).

To be clear -- I think Celeste's firing is a completely fucked situation, but that we'd be wiser to separate it from the AnimeAmerica testimonies. One's confirmed true by name + Glitch responded to it, the other's all uncharacteristically vague anonymous testimony.

That's my main sticking point; the testimonies themselves are very nebulous and I believe they only evolved in detail as skepticism began piling about them. This could very well be a whole buncha cope on my part but flowery language like the last testimony's "yet you [Kevin Lerdwichagul] sit on your broken throne" is very odd when it comes from an exposing of workplace abuse. It's the kind of thing you'd find in a breakup letter, not a years-later testimony is what I'm trying to say.

It's extra weird that the testimonies would be anonymous too -- Glitch isn't exactly an established player in the industry, so I don't see how blacklisting would be a concern [EDIT: though NDAs could be behind that], and by now you'd expected some ex-employee identities to have begun coming out instead of all of them being anonymous. A personal impression that could easily turn out wrong; all of the AnimeAmerica testimonies [which are themselves not verified sources, even if the person posting them is] read awfully similar to have come from different people with different trajectories, and it's definitely eyebrow-raising that they get crazier and more flowery with time.

In any case, if there's any truth to the narrative we'll see so in the credits to MD ep7. There'll be a lot of missing names compared to ep6's/TADC's, or they'll stay mostly the same.

At this point I don’t know what the creative industry expects happening when they put more and more tools behind a paywall for stuff that you need to learn for the industry to get an entry somehow.

Most of artists and people from other departments in the gaming industry for example are self taught especially in the field of 3D. It’s still a very young industry so of course for the most time there weren’t schools so you taught it yourself. And it still is so in parts. Many people were hired that way.

Even with a degree you still need to be active and learn and look at new developments from time to time. You need to aquire those yourself. And it gets expensive more and more with every year when you have no company that helps out with company floating licenses. With unity and now (maybe) unreal it’s another step to making things difficult. And it will result in less people trying and therefore less senior potentials and therefore smaller teams, therefore more crunch to those that are already in the industry and less new input like ideas etc(additionally with the fact that companies shy away from actually hiring juniors atm). It will become a vicious cycle.

What Does a 100 Hour Work Week in Animation Feel Like So I saw (and commented on) this post remarking on the working conditions on the new Spiderverse film which were less than stellar. I'm not surprised, I was literally talking to animator friends about how it seemed like it was a tough project even as the trailers were coming out. But I think we see news like this break all the time - ah a game got delayed. Don't worry. "Oh the dev team is working 90 hour weeks until it comes out". Red Dead Redemption infamously had a manager brag about 100 hour weeks. Some members of the team on Sonic the Hedgehog did 120 hour weeks to update the model to something with much less human-looking teeth. It's all very abstract. So I thought I might provide a little insight into how different workweeks feel for me. For context, I am an able-bodied high functioning person who is, by all accounts neurotypical, but who still struggles with overstimulation and needs a lot of therapy. If I feel this way, then imagine how someone disabled is faring under the same conditions, and consider how much of a barrier of entry this really is to the industry. Disclaimer: I'm going to be describing a not great work/life balance from a practical point of view. I work a lot. I try not to. I don't always get it right. Please don't think of what you're about to read as how you 'should' be working in the industry. Whenever possible, insist on your rights to rest and live a life outside work.

40hr week - What would be considered a standard workweek. Animation is a thinking heavy job, so I’m usually tired at the end of the week, but I do still have energy to see friends, do personal work, go for walks, work out. I would prefer a shorter week but it’s doable.

50hr week - Probably my personal average if we’re being honest. This is not always due to the animation job itself - for financial reasons, I usually have small sidejobs next to full-time employment and the hours add up. This week works alright so long as I plan them well. Mealpreps, using google calendars to make sure I'm carving out time for workouts, cleaning and a bit of rest.

60hr week - I have spent a lot of months this year pushing 60 hour weeks and let me tell you, I don't like it. I'm tired. Social life and personal projects go on the backburner. I'm less delighted, less inspired. I still work out, but less. Wrists begin to tingle, shoulders sometimes get more sore than I like. If I fail to mealprep I end up spending so much money on prepackaged lunches. I'm processing stress in my dreams, so I often wake up in the middle of the night and lie awake. Light brainfog starts kicking in. I'm more sensitive to things not going my way because I just don't have much energy left to problemsolve anything that isn't work.

70hr week - This is when I personally start considering a schedule to be 'crunch'. For some the number is higher and for some lower, but for me, a 70hr workweek starts to really fray me at the edges. I have time for work, the commute and sleep, and not much else. I try to get in workouts where I can, to avoid my RSI flaring up too badly. I am no longer seeing friends. I am no longer drawing for myself. I'm not reading books. Maybe I watch a youtube video over dinner. It's not a state I can (or should) sustain for very long. 80hr week - This is where I'm hitting my ceiling. I have done this on rare occassions. My personal max is 85 hours of work in a week, and the personal record of maintaining it was 4 weeks, and those weeks were a shitshow. Cannot recommend. Towards the end, my shoulder was on fire and I had recurring headaches. I was doing all of my stretches and still managing the gym, and somehow it was never enough to soothe the RSI symptoms I can otherwise usually manage. The should injury I got during that month still haunts me to this day.

And I cannot stress enough, I never made it to those famed 100 hour weeks. I honestly don't know how anyone manages anything above 60 for an extended period of time. I know people sleep under their desks to avoid commuting time cutting into work hours, but i just feel like the brainfog would render me incapable of making anything good or even passable.