Was talking to my friend that works at a studio that is currently crunching and he’s told me some horror stories thats going on there. It reminds me of studios I’ve worked at in the past as well.
I have some ‘Commandments’ of a sort I think Game Developers should avoid:
1) Thou Shalt Never Code your own scripting language
This is pretty much always a bad idea if you need a full blown scripting language just use LUA. It’s easy to drop in, familiar to game designers worldwide, and really simple to use. You can even use a LUABind to bind it to C++ objects if required. When your function is called via LUA- you receive the LUA State machine as the argument with variables on the stack. Accessing the variables is as simple as popping them off the stack. You can toss an error if not all the required variables is present, etc.
Designers can even declare their own structure and pass that to you. LUA can be interpretered during runtime or compiled directly to bytecode. LUA should be all most studios need. It’s been used in FarCry, World of Warcraft, SOE Star Wars Galaxy, etc. So please, stop writing your own. Use something that’s complete and robust and its FREE!
2) Thou Shalt Schedule what Is Needed for Next Delivery
Your engineers and everyone involved should know exactly what is needed for the next milestone. All of your assets should hopefully be planned out and you should give yourself time in your schedule to add new ones.
3) Thou Shalt Inform New Candidates About What is Expected of Them
I’ve seen studios hire new candidates only to see them quit within first few months. Sad. You should convey to them exactly how you conduct Crunch. If you expect them to work 7 days straight to get to a milestone then this should probably be discussed. The interviewee should try to ask this Loaded question and the people during the Interview should try to answer honestly. If you have unique rules to your company consider giving this to them in a handout. Established like EA-LA once again has the edge here- they give out nice pretty manuals to potential candidates explaining all of their unique rules
4) Always Expect New Studios To be Highly Risky
This goes without saying but new studios and teams are still learning how to work together here. Sometimes the management might be new to their positions.
5) Your Employees Should be Worth More Then An ‘Asset’ or Feature
I’ve seen studios lose Engineers when they break this sacred rule. Just because you have some bright idea that this new Gun or Creature will look really awesome in your game shouldn’t give the Employer license to demand everyone Crunch last minute to get this asset in there. Many times, this new Asset won’t be shown anyway. I’ve seen staff get so pissed off they quit soon after being forced to work overtime for some feature last minute. The bad thing too is that once you lose one guy- several others will trickle out as well and morale goes down the tubes.
This is just bad business. What you should do instead is try to get Engineers to perhaps plan what they will do for next month if possible. Get a breakdown and estimates for each individual tasks. Now the employee knows he must bide by this contract and he will know when he is behind schedule. At Electronic Arts - Los Angeles on Command and Conquer we had everything planned out for that milestone. As soon as you slip on a feature you knew you were behind. Every week the Engineer meets with the Develop Director to review their progress. This worked for that studio and at least if you end up crunching you know it’s your own fault. EA-LA, inspite of having demanding schedules had some of the lowest turnover I’ve ever seen period.
6. Thou Shalt Use Rotating Shifts for Deadlines
There are some studios that will- out of the blue, expect their workers to simply stay all night at the drop of the dime. This is another thing Electronic Arts - Los Angeles mastered- they employed rotating shifts. This way an engineer can come in early and work his shift and then you stagnant the night owl engineer to stay late by telling him to come in around Noon. This way we have maximum coverage. This is so darn fundamental and its shocking to see so many little studios not employ this. Instead, they try to force people to stay around the clock and are probably breaking labor laws (I’m not sure on this depends on the state).
Crunching for a milestone is fine- but let people design their own schedules around your Core Work Hours.
7. Thou Shalt Send Management to Human Resource Training
I’ve worked at some good studios that were very tacky and had 7 day crunches yet we were happy because we had a good boss that had good Charisma. Being friendly with your workers and taking them out to lunch makes them feel good. Ordering them food and perhaps having a ‘game day’ where you all play a new game release or your favorite game is so much fun. This studio was one of the most fun places I worked at and we had seriously low turnover rate. So even though you might not have good leaders at your place per se you can get good feelings from your employees if you maintain a fair environment.
8. Listen to Your Employees Complaints BEFORE They Quit
You should give your workers and open forum to discuss policies at the company they do not like whether this feedback is conducted via anonymous tests etc is up to the studio of course. Ideally, once every week or two, the producer should schedule 1-on-1 time with each employee. Make sure they are happy. Take even the slightest complaints seriously. This minor complaint they may have might help be a deciding factor before they take another job. Often times their complaints are normal company policy they may disagree with
9. Don’t Rely on Email
Email sucks quite frankly. Never use Email as a tool to discipline an Employee. Call them into your office, close the door, and discuss the issues. When you Email someone the tone of your voice might come across as ’screaming’. You would get pissed if an Employee simply emailed you and Quit so why do you all of a sudden think Email is a good device to discipline someone? It’s not- it sucks.
This is the deal. A bad Lead will email you their complaints, etc. A good Lead will try to schedule some 1-on-1 time with their employees regularly and this is a great, comfortable forum to give advice and criticism. Most people have somewhat bad verbal memory but Email is something we will always remember- word for word. If we forget, we can just re-read the Email and get ourselves pissed all over again
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