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[Cobralad]

Come in sceletons and ghouls, rise from your desks to tell srories of bad work experience. Warn youngrels about grim predicament that awaits them in macabre world of gamedev.
blahh

[Superb Joe]

my life partner arthur crunched on christmas day to release merry gear 2 on time

[Cobralad]

{edit:outraced by angry joe, such is my doom}
ill start with mine:
Before graduating, i treated gamedev as something i did on a weekend or free time, something that did not even felt like work. After graduating i joined development as a pixel artist on a point and click game that i thought would be a quick project to cut my teeth on. There was no contracts or agreements, just two small dudes working in free times through chat. Later programmer got funding from other small indie studio and enlisted third member, a writer.
I did barely cut expenses, there is not a lot of stuff thats reasonably copypasted. The one thing that i remember having least fun with were animations for small objects like doors or boxes. There is no two same doors in this game, despite them looking samish. Instead of asking to just make it two frames of open/closed door, i wasted time moving sliding doors frame by frame. It should be pointed out i was peak ocd/anxiety, so just drawing straight line felt like facing life or death decision. In the end product dialog triggers simultainosly with most animations of stuff opening and players cant see those animations behind dialog window.
Late in development our 3 man team participated in ludum dare and in those 4 or so days i knew more about my team than in several years of working with them. This was when working on a game finally felt like work, like something on the level with the stuff that made me slide mentally while studying. Such tight conditions allowed me to see exactly how idea pipeline works in this team and how my stuff gets digested within this set of individuals.
Pushing hard during jam may have bitten me in the ass. After seeing programmer and me stay up all night during ludum dare, writer got inspired to to deliver a lot of writing. This in turn required me to draw many assets that i could not just care about this late in development. Needless to say, this honest boys work ouroboros ran out of steam. Development went year more than planned, but ended up with less content than intended in beginning.

Critically it did better than we expected, though defeatist tone was noticeable in interwievs and even game description(or im just seeing things). People did not even notice stuff that i considered to be placeholder or outright mistakes i did not fix. At the end of the day the biggest flaw turned out to be poor english translation, something we did not even consider during development.

[goob256]

Just mentioned this to someone. Every industry has crunch or overtime. I've had jobs across almost everything, from labour, fast food, customer service to game development. I've had to do excessive overtime in all of them. I'm not sure where the idea that gamedev is special comes from.

[goob256]

Sorry Cobralad, not to take away from your post. I've had a similar experience with gamedev and it's the shits. What's your game?

[Cobralad]

Just mentioned this to someone. Every industry has crunch or overtime. I've had jobs across almost everything, from labour, fast food, customer service to game development. I've had to do excessive overtime in all of them. I'm not sure where the idea that gamedev is special comes from.

well, we are on gamedev proffesional forum at the time rockstar game work practices get blasted.
It generally boils down to bad managment and planning. This game was not the worst experience i had in gamedev, maybe ill share more. I also dont want to explicitly call out anyone so ill just leave the clues.

[NowSayPillow]

Just mentioned this to someone. Every industry has crunch or overtime. I've had jobs across almost everything, from labour, fast food, customer service to game development. I've had to do excessive overtime in all of them. I'm not sure where the idea that gamedev is special comes from.

Aye. I love my job and I consistently work 50+ hour weeks (would do more if they let me), I have no idea what to make of people when they complain about "crunch".

[Cobralad]

Aye. I love my job and I consistently work 50+ hour weeks (would do more if they let me), I have no idea what to make of people when they complain about "crunch".

That article may be PR BS. Liam Edwards, who is on this website with Flitspire devlog and worked on Gta 5 and rdr 2 is now on record on Dad & Sons podcast saying overtime was not optional. 100+ may have been exageration, but 80(7 days 11 hours) was most likely a thing.
Its also not just hour but shitty treatment for juniors and new hires. Its was an open secret for years that rockstar and cd project had collective mentality of "youre a disposable shit peasant and we gave golden ticket to you".

[NowSayPillow]

Aye. I love my job and I consistently work 50+ hour weeks (would do more if they let me), I have no idea what to make of people when they complain about "crunch".

That article may be pr fluff. Liam Edwards, who is on this website and worked there is now on record saying overtime was mandatory.

You're right, it might be (and probably is). But what's considered overtime? Anything over 35hours? (Honest question I've never worked at a studio.)

[Cobralad]

i never worked in studio either, but i guess 5 days 10 hours is generally accepted. It also depends on job, as you would not survive something like that as a teacher for example.

[Lurk]

When I started working, many years ago, was so eager to give it my best that I would stay overnight in the office and sleep on a couch. It was in a sense the way I used to perceive the lifestyle of being in the game industry as a young man. My youthful enthusiasm earned me more responsibilities and more control over the game, so I saw it as a natural thing. But it became too much because I wanted everything to be perfect and I started making sense of the time left before shipping vs the time it took to actually make things in my head; I would go, ok I have a week left, if I put in one hour to make each picture, I can make it for the deadline. Except we human don't work in linear fashion and what looks good in an excel sheet is not always on par with reality. I slept 3-4 hours nights, poorly, dreaming of rendering stuff, only to wake up disappointed because all my hard night work did not exist in reality. I drank a lot of caffeine/energy boosters, had no appetite. It culminated in a crazy, no way to make it deadline I still could not believe I would'nt make. The producer brought us breakfast, i took a bite and could'nt eat any of it. I would hear people speak around me and take random words they said and reorganize new sentences(mostly paranoid/negative stuff). I went in a meeting room where the producer and lead were sitting, smoking cigarettes, relaxing, while I was slowly killing myself and just quit. I went home, took a walk with my girlfriend, there was a light frozen snow on the ground and I felt for a moment I was so free, like a wave or a leaf in the wind. Then I slept a lot, tried to get around everything. I realized in the following days an important lesson, as I saw everyone was getting on without me and that I had not made as much a difference as I thought I had by putting so many hours. That it had only been important for me to do it.

I never did overtime again and never needed to. You have to learn to understand what you can do in a certain amount of time, and when you're not given the proper time to do it, what you can do with less. I've seen people go crazy trying to extract more time from their lives to give to a structure that really does'nt care in truth and I'm happy it happened to me at the start, so I could recover from it quickly.

[goob256]

Aye. I love my job and I consistently work 50+ hour weeks (would do more if they let me), I have no idea what to make of people when they complain about "crunch".

I wasn't trying to say it's OK. Heed the post above this one. I was the same at one point but it will destroy you and it's not worth it or necessary.

[Oroboros]

My incredibly inept art director came in one day and told me "Oh shit I forgot to tell you, we have a full page illustration due for PCGamer on Monday. We need to get it done." He had received an email weeks earlier stating they were writing a piece on the title we're working on and wanted original art and he completely forgot about it.

This was on a Friday afternoon. And much to my horror, after dropping this crap on my lap he went home at 5 as usual to enjoy his weekend. To give you guys some reference, it usually takes 2-3 weeks to get a good illustration together. I called my girlfriend and asked her to drop off a pillow for me at work, saying I was going to disappear for a few days.

I proceeded to get 5 hours of sleep over the next 3 days as I attempted the impossible. It got done but I was incredibly unhappy with it and this backpage illustration still sits on my shelf reminding me of what could have been if I'd been given the proper notice. This company was a nightmare and many such instances happened due to ineptitude of people managing the project.

Needless to say I don't work there anymore.

[Superb Joe]

My incredibly inept art director came in one day and told me "Oh shit I forgot to tell you, we have a full page illustration due for PCGamer on Monday. We need to get it done." He had received an email weeks earlier stating they were writing a piece on the title we're working on and wanted original art and he completely forgot about it.

This was on a Friday afternoon. And much to my horror, after dropping this crap on my lap he went home at 5 as usual to enjoy his weekend. To give you guys some reference, it usually takes 2-3 weeks to get a good illustration together. I called my girlfriend and asked her to drop off a pillow for me at work, saying I was going to disappear for a few days.

I proceeded to get 5 hours of sleep over the next 3 days as I attempted the impossible. It got done but I was incredibly unhappy with it and this backpage illustration still sits on my shelf reminding me of what could have been if I'd been given the proper notice. This company was a nightmare and many such instances happened due to ineptitude of people managing the project.

Needless to say I don't work there anymore.

please, i must know how the story ends for the inept guy

[litHermit]

please, i must know how the story ends for the inept guy

^this!

[Oroboros]

Well, I'll say that it was the first company I ended up quitting. I lasted as long as I could but I put my health first and made the call to go elsewhere. My sudden departure planted some seeds about this guy's methods (Or lack of).

This Art Director was fired eventually when other people caught on to his incompetence, and the entire company tanked not long after. He's unemployed now, go figure. 

[Superb Joe]

solidarity with the lazy guy who is bad at his job *raises fist*

[Cobralad]

crunch does not pay

[ProgramGamer]

This is worthy of Clients From Hell o_O

Glad you made it out of there at least, and by the looks of it you're doing something more fulfilling now.

[Oroboros]

This is worthy of Clients From Hell o_O

Glad you made it out of there at least, and by the looks of it you're doing something more fulfilling now.

I'm in a much better place now. It was good to have these experiences, taught me a lot as to how not to run things. I think it helps to share them. The industry isn't always like this, I was just dealt a bad hand for a few companies. A lot of my friends have been at the same companies for years with barely any hitches. I'll share one more:


Story 2:
Husband and Wife


A larger company I worked at had a very strange issue going on where the husband had managed to convince higher ups to hire his wife as a producer, even though she had no background in game development.

I remember that the employee manual had a whole section on conflict of interest, including how it's against company policy to use power to hire relatives. Go figure.

Now all the people below realized over time this person had no idea what she was doing, which was resulting in scrums and planning going badly haywire, and a breakdown in communication for a new project being developed. This resulted in unnecessary crunch time being forced on anyone to meet deadlines that should have been quite manageable. Whenever employees tried to bring it up to the husband (Who was a creative director), he would retaliate against these people.

My art director had enough and ultimately snapped on this display of nepotism, calling out the creative director saying his wife was driving the project to the ground due to her inexperience. The art director got threatened with firing and quit to go to a much better studio, he didn't deserve that.

On our last lunch meeting he told me: "I was the barrier between you guys and that bullshit, you might have to go at it alone from now on." It was a chilling warning.

The creative director decided art directors were no longer needed and that he would take on that role.  

In the next few months 80% of the art team would be fired as they raised concerns, with the husband and wife ganging up on any people who questioned their abilities until there were only 4 of us left out of the original 15. A good dozen other people on the new project (Which was very promising) ultimately put in their notice seeing the writing on the wall. A lot of them couldn't take the artificial crunch scenario that had been created.

Starting to feel overwhelmed when he realized he couldn't outsource the art and maintain consistent quality as well as manage all the other facets, he went to the higher ups and stated the project couldn't continue because the artists had derailed the project. He accepted zero responsiblity and blamed us remaining artists trying to do our job under duress. The project I spent 2 years developing got shut down, hundreds of hours and millions of dollars down the drain. And this left the studio with nothing to present to the main division for their next project, because of this man's insane ego.

Shortly after us remaining artists were called into a room and told we were being laid off. On the plus side, we were given 6 months severange..This afforded me the chance to go independent. It was a relief honestly, when I saw that check I actually felt happy that I'd have a few months to figure things out.

A few of us decided to send emails to the main office explaining the disaster that had unfolded, and this resulted in an audit being performed on that division. Long story short: Wife was instantly fired due to violation of protocol, creative director was demoted and put on probation till he was fired a few months later...He had developed such a terrible reputation with so many people word got out and he got himself straight industry blacklisted.