How to Avoid Crunch?
8 min read
Many people working in the creative industry, including video game developers, say that crunch cannot be avoided. Keeping deadlines is problematic for artists since creating something artistic is an extremely unpredictable and chaotic process, which sometimes requires staying at work overtime.
However, you can fight it and take some steps to significantly reduce or even avoid crunch altogether! It will help to create better games and keep the team motivated.
Topics covered in this article:
What Is Crunch?
Crunch is certainly not part of the daily life of developers, but it does happen sometimes and is quite a problem. We use this word for the periods, most often just before the achieving any important stage of production (commonly known as milestones), when employees are required to regularly stay at work overtime in order to catch up with deadlines. It often takes place just before the product is released to the market. When it comes to a game, postponing the release date is not easy. It is most often met with the dissatisfaction of both players waiting for the title we are creating and investors financing the production.
Unfortunately, the crunch is not always limited only to the last stretch before the premiere. We often undertake to achieve certain milestones on pre-agreed dates by signing contracts with investors. It may be the end of the prototype creation and entering the phase of development, finishing half of the planned mechanics, or preparing a playable demo version for a gaming expo.
Although crunch is most often referred to in the context of the video game industry and IT in general, this term is also familiar to other representatives of the creative sector.
Consequences of Long Crunching
As you can easily guess, staying longer at work for a long time, and sometimes even on weekends, in addition to double the intensity of work, is not pleasant. If this time is not compensated in any way, we have a recipe for a disaster. What impact can it have on employees and the entire business?
Lowered Efficiency
Exhausted employees significantly lose productivity and stop noticing a huge number of mistakes made. As a result, the quality of their work drops significantly. In this case, extra hours put into the project might eventually make it worse and add additional work in the future, for example, the need of fixing bugs or the need to rework some things from scratch.
Accelerated Burnout
Long overtime work causes loss of motivation and accelerated burnout. Especially in the video games industry, people in higher positions like managers, who have more responsibilities, tend to burn out quickly. Many of them change their workplace for a better one or even change their profession. Crunch culture forced many talented people to stop working in the video game industry because they needed calmer work, which could give them psychological comfort.
Negative Impact on the Atmosphere in the Team
Each of the employees would prefer to spend time resting and playing with their family instead of being forced to sit in the office with their colleagues. This, in turn, may lead to situations where if a new problem arises, it may intentionally be unreported to avoid being the one to bring bad news.
Quitting Risk
Employees will collectively take a couple of days off to rest and spend some time with their families at the first opportunity. In extreme cases, they may even quit after (or even in the middle of!) the crunch, which will further worsen the situation of the rest of the team and the entire company.
Lower Quality of the Final Product
The process of developing a product, an app, or a game can be sped up to some degree, but many tasks simply cannot be done faster and equally high-quality. Development teams usually have their own pace, and when it is disturbed, employees have to work long hours and are likely to make more mistakes.
Disturbed Work/Life Balance
Work/life balance is not only a fancy concept, but it is a necessity to keep employees happy and productive. When they have to work overtime, crunch also becomes a problem for their partners and families. They feel guilty about neglecting loved ones, and it is hard for them to focus on work. Unhappy and stressed employees cannot be productive.
The Causes of Crunch
It is said that bad management is the only cause of crunch. While this is not untrue, this statement overly simplifies the problem. Sometimes it may be the fault of excessive optimism when setting deadlines for respective milestones - a problem typical for small studies that are just debuting.
Other times, the problem may be chaos in communication caused by poor information exchange. In yet another case, the necessity to work overtime results from deciding on a specific vision of the project while skipping the prototyping phase altogether.
Later, in the middle of production, it turns out that the idea just does not work, and the studio needs to redo a significant part of the content. Understanding the reasons why wrong decisions are made is crucial to avoid repeating them in the future.
Dealing With Crunch
We already know what crunch is, why it is dangerous and what it results from. The big question is: what can we do about it?
Many game development studios try to take actions like making sure that developers and artists are fed during crunch, but it is not nearly enough. Poor planning, which leads to the crunch, is a complex problem that requires a complex solution. Reducing crunch is possible and should be implemented as quickly as possible.
Do Not Make All Decisions on Your Own
Employees are able to independently estimate the time needed to perform the entrusted part of the work. Their opinion will give you a better sense of the scale of the project. Especially more experienced employees who know exactly how the development cycle works and how long every part takes are a good source of information.
Ensure a Good Flow of Information
Communication is the key to identifying and solving problems before they get too serious. Many solutions for companies on the market significantly improve this process and help you track work progress.
Make Sure You Have an Appropriate Margin of Error When Setting Deadlines
Things do not always go according to plan. We can't predict office power failure, central server failure, or whether we will get stuck for a week because of a sudden complex problem.
Ensure Reasonable Workload
Depending on the size of the team and the nature of the production, it may be better to focus on the methodical creation of individual parts of the game step by step or to divide employees into smaller teams that will simultaneously work on, for example, different locations in the game.
Don't Bite off More Than You Can Chew
Consider whether you really have a large enough team to cope with the tasks at hand? For a team of several people, creating a complex open-world game is virtually impossible, regardless of their experience. Perhaps it is worth considering expanding the team or outsourcing some of the work to external subcontractors?
Outsourcing is a very popular solution nowadays. There are even portals dedicated to hiring artists and developers to help with commercial projects. Hiring freelancers or people to work on specific tasks will help you unburden full-time employees without permanently expanding the team size.
"Will We Really Need This?"
Sometimes it's better to compromise and cut a few non-essential parts from the production, even if that means losing a few months worth of work. Such decisions are always difficult, but they can save the whole enterprise and save employees from working excessive hours.
Appreciate the Efforts of the Employees
When the worst comes to the worst and crunch mode cannot be avoided, it is important that employees can count on fair treatment. It should be kept in mind that legal regulations regarding overtime differ depending on the region and the form of employment. Regardless of the regulations, try, to your abilities, to ensure your subordinates an adequate reward for their efforts and allow them to take leave. Showing understanding and equal treatment is the absolute basis for a healthy atmosphere in any company.
What to Do During Crunch?
Above all, stay rational and don't panic. Unfortunately, crunch cannot always be avoided, even with the above advice. Try to do everything to complete the tasks as soon as possible and keep the team motivated. Respect your colleagues, act as a team and let everyone know what else needs to be done and how much of it is left. Putting extra pressure on anyone will not help; it will only hurt everyone around. Crunch will end eventually, but the atmosphere will stay with you for a long time—so make sure it's the best it can be!
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