afgavinstan wrote:

Is crunch a thing in movies/TV? Maybe like, in post-production? Music? Not being pedantic. Genuinely curious if it's as widespread to the point where its just dealt with as "lol it is what it is". Also shoutouts to Schrier. His book is fucking great.

TV is complicated because the vast majority of technical people are freelancers and not on contracts.
We frequently work all the hours under the sun because sometimes that's just what it takes to get a live show done if the shit has hit the fan, and the people that go that extra mile are going to get the lion's share of the work in the future because your reputation is everything in this game.
100 hour weeks? Done plenty of 'em over the years (though thankfully not for some time), and none of them was in a nice warm office either. Never complained about. It's just part of the job when it needs to be, and we love what we do.
Bear in mind also that we aren't paid overtime or bonuses or anything like that. We're all on daily buy-outs where you work till the job is done. If the phone rings with another job, that's your bonus.

Crunch up to deadlines is standard in any creative industry, aye. You should see what publishing can be like … Imagine working on a newspaper, where every day is a crunch day for the next issue. Stress levels through the fucking roof.

Crunch is definitely a thing when up against deadlines, the difference with games is that crunch can be factored in as part of meeting those deadlines in the first place.

IIRC filming big budget cinema involves long hours as there's massive overheads associated with keeping the production going so they try and do it within as few days of shooting as possible.

Also in second hand tales from Pez, there's also a lot of *fix it in post* bullllllssssshhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit that happens in VFX as parts of movies are reshot, fucking up the schedule late in the day and all the fixing is dumped onto the VFX teams. 

This seems like something that would be avoidable in games, but I suppose a random bug could fuck some shit up for you late in the day. That said, it isn't the first time any of the really big dev houses are making these games and these days there is a big push to reuse engines and assets which should mitigate some of the showstopper bugs coming out of nowhere and even if they can't, they know from experience how much time they go over on each production because of unforeseen issues, so they absolutely can quantify it and plan for it on subsequent projects. 

They just don't, probably because they lack the ability to program in the sequence of work to keep 500 people busy for 12 months, so they just program for 350 people and let them do 18 months work in 12, because hey, at least there won't be any downtime or people sitting around with nothing to do costing the company money. I feel like issues with smooth project delivery are not limited to games or vfx and they apply to any large "creative" undertaking, where the creative vision cannot be overseen by a few individuals and requires a whole group of people to manage. 

Getting people to collaborate and plan to that level is really difficult, the same shit happens in construction all the time on big jobs. Designs are fucked around with until the last second because people can't leave things alone or don't talk to the right people during the design of a particular element, which causes remedial work to start cropping up which starts fucking with your programme because it's effectively unplanned for because people are dumdums. 

I'm with reg tho, not picking this up, not looking for a fight with people who are getting it, this is a horses for courses, pick your consumer battles thing. UNLIKE FALLOUT SHITTY ASS 76 KILL ME NOW OH MY SWEET POST NUCLEAR PRINCE WHAT DID TODD HOWARD DO TO YOU?

Reg could have contributed more constructively than one post with unclear content and five saying "cya". Anyone else who does that gets shot done. Not the most constructive language from @andy but I kinda share the sentiment...

You could take issue with the swears, but the sentiment wasn't out of order, for the reasons Muzz stated.

The abuse is out of order.

Fryface unsure if Muzzy is getting shot done or getting shot done.

I don’t think he knows apart from some vague notion of supporting the poor abused rockstar employees.

I’m just giving that a read now. So far, it’s not selling me on the game at all. It sounds like they’ve put in just about everything I disliked about San Andreas and added a bit more besides.

The stuff about having to eat and maintain your weight in RDR2 brings back bad memories of San Andreas.

JonB wrote:

Bob wrote:

Not ok hun

This is really annoying as well BTW.

PM me

Roujin wrote:

This seems like something that would be avoidable in games, but I suppose a random bug could fuck some shit up for you late in the day. That said, it isn't the first time any of the really big dev houses are making these games and these days there is a big push to reuse engines and assets which should mitigate some of the showstopper bugs coming out of nowhere and even if they can't, they know from experience how much time they go over on each production because of unforeseen issues, so they absolutely can quantify it and plan for it on subsequent projects.  

They just don't, probably because they lack the ability to program in the sequence of work to keep 500 people busy for 12 months, so they just program for 350 people and let them do 18 months work in 12, because hey, at least there won't be any downtime or people sitting around with nothing to do costing the company money. I feel like issues with smooth project delivery are not limited to games or vfx and they apply to any large "creative" undertaking, where the creative vision cannot be overseen by a few individuals and requires a whole group of people to manage.

I've been angry with B about this a couple of times. I'm also convinced studios should know by now how to schedule for bugs and unforeseen problems. B insists it's impossible, for example, at his new place, he's a senior tech something. He was tasked with fixing / rewriting something a previous employee had done. No one really knew what was going on in the code, and the person responsible wasn't around anymore to ask. A lot of it had made it's way into other parts of code, so while fixing a problem in the main file could mean another one popped up somewhere else. This might not even be found immediately, depends if anyone was using that little bit of code. There were two weeks scheduled for this, but even B's lead admitted he had no overview of the actual problem and just didn't realize it was gonna take over a month to fix. Now this was around pre production I think, so there was time to fix it, but it was still stressful. 

Re-using engines, that's not completely true. GG wrote a completely new engine for Horizon, and RaD is using their own tech too. Features in engines are often specified for specific genres, so it's not always easy. Using the Frost Engine for Dragon Age (if I remember correctly, would need to have a peak into "blood, sweat and pixels" to confirm) completely killed that game. The team had to do so much hacking, the dice engineers were in a completely different timezone and it was just impossible to get it working for an RPG in stead of FPS.
Plus the tech is still evolving. If there's an update for Unreal Engine, you need to decide if it's worth it for everyone to update. There might be stuff in the update that would make some parts of development easier, but could also mean a step back in other areas.


Hollywood is probably more stressful than most game companies. One of B's friends at GG went to game development after Hollywood just got too much for him. He didn't want to have the constant possibility of being part of a lay off all the time while working crazy hours. He worked at ILM before leaving for games (which were a disappointment at first, but when settled in after some months he was happy with the change he made) and before that he was working somewhere that had all the lay offs, when there was industry trouble a couple years ago. I forgot what, but he was part of the lay offs then.

Here's an article. Someone asked different devs how they think of people not wanting to buy RDR2 and how they think people could or should react in their opinion.
It's not written in the best way, but there's a couple of interesting things in there. 

I've never played a Rockstar game, and I won't be buying this. B might buy it, but I asked him to wait for second hand copy's to show up. I rather spend the money on the physical release of Hellblade.

I'm incredibly naive in this (not a coder in the slightest) but I would have assumed from a project management perspective they should have a reasonable estimate of how much unexpected code behaviour adds to a development cycle. Not perfectly, but a reasonable estimate based on similar situations, engine and platform idiosyncracies and team size.

Not planning for that is basically incompetence. However I wonder who pays the price for it? Surely its reasonable to expect that the shit rolls downhill as in any heirarchy.

There really needs to be labour laws to protect the non-management people from being exploited. I tend to agree with Reg, but I'm arguing from ignorance. Fortunately, Nina's opinion from experience is compelling.