Uncharted director criticizes triple-a development, says it can 'destroy people'

[potato_hamster]

SvennoJ said:

potato_hamster said:

Yes they do. The do do concept work called a "vertical slice". But that reallt depends on the game. Some games require months, if not years of work to get a point before you'll truly know whether a concept will work or not, or whether or not a gameplay feature is actually fun. Sometimes the best ideas on paper simply aren't fun to play. You can't really plan for "having to completely redesign a critical gameplay feature because it isn't any fun".

True, but does that happen so often that crunch time is a given nowadays?

That time off structure for overtime is pretty cynical. I guess it's better than being let go when production ramps down at the beginning of a new project. The average employment rate where I worked wasn't very different. A lot of young people came to work there for a year or so to learn some stuff and add it to their resume. Hiring more people to increase production doesn't work when they leave again just after you train them. Software development is a very transient work environment, disposable employees and disposable jobs.

Every single serious project I've worked on has had a crunch period. Most times this happens after Alpha is declared, but it can start even easier if the project's schedule starts going long early, especially on annual release games or games with short development times.