Posts tagged with “game”

Crunch does not always mean Quality of Life or Quality of Work has to suffer, it’s just that in most circumstances it does, because of the way it’s implemented. I have gone through two sets of crunch, both mandatory, one long, one mitigated, and both sucked. But there are a few things that I found helped me, and I think would help others, get through any period of crunch:

1. Provide All the Information: Inform everyone how much more you expect them to work, what needs to be done, and where the deadline is. If ANY of this information changes, make sure the team knows. I have been in and heard about crunch situations where information about deadlines or cut features was withheld, and this only makes people angry
2. Allow people to choose their extra hours: People are different and have different home lives. Some people work better in the morning, others at night, others over the weekend. Do not blanket ask everyone to stay late. Instead, let them choose when to work and they will choose times that will not only make them most productive, but will interfere with their lives the least.
3. Allow people to work from home: Set up your infrastructure to let people work from home. Some people can be just as productive at home as they can be in the office, and this removes the stress of a long commute and improves QoL since they can be around for their loved ones.
4. Allow people during longer periods of crunch to take some time off: This is huge for me, and I’ve never been anywhere that does this. If your crunch is going to last a long time, or looks like it will need to be lengthened, give people a day off. Say “Okay, everyone can take a day off free sometime in the next two weeks.” Giving them a time frame allows them to plan for things like short trips, or time with their family. They’ll come back rested, happier and more productive.
5. Make sure they have and know the reward: In a start-up, the reward is in the stock, but in larger companies, make sure people know they will be compensated of extra hours, and then compensate them.

Hopefully this makes sense. I don’t like crunch either, and it is avoidable for companies that have really experienced teams and a certain amount of give, but some companies do not and will not have the luxury to avoid crunch entirely. Obviously, great companies will always avoid crunch, usually because they’ve learned from their mistakes. But realize that a good company may crunch, but will always find a way to mitigate it when and if it happens, and will learn from their mistakes on their way to becoming a great company.

[For more insights from Jeff, stop by his blog at JeffOnGames.com and follow him on Twitter at @FuzzyBinary]

Yeah, I just did a blog post about this last week, but it’s a good cause so here it is again. The Complete Game Completion Marathon is this weekend and they (we?) need your support! As of writing this we’re just above $2,200, well away from our rock star goal of $10K. Donate if you can afford it! And then check out the website and watch us make fools of ourselves for you and the rest of the intarwebs this weekend.

Not sure how to donate? Click this big link below! Want to see what we’re doing? Check out last week’s blog post.

Here is a guest post by Josh Diaz, a good friend of mine who has been helping me out with this D&D campaign. We’ll start a separate blog of our D&D adventures, more on that soon. And with that I’ll turn it over to Josh!

On Monday evenings, a group of heroes gathered in a crowded town square, uniting to help protect their homelands. At the same time, a group of game developers gathered in a dingy dungeon, to help learn the origins of their craft.

That’s right, Fire Hose is running a D&D campaign! I was invited by our Dungeon Master, Eitan, along with a select group of the realm’s finest scholars and sharpest blades, to come around and play in a game of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. 4th Edition is an updated version of the long-running game, and some of the design changes look back to both the original ‘tactical wargaming’ history of its predecessors, while also drawing on the immediacy and class balancing of modern computer and video games.

The rules are long, bookish, and copyrighted — so I’ll direct your attention to Eitan’s simple, but beautiful world. As Dungeon Master, Eitan is artist, writer, programmer *and* executable: he sets up the world our characters will inhabit, and keeps everything moving while we react to new events. As such, he’s come up with a little slice of a world that was richly represented with just a little bit of advance work. Pulling from real-world sources, our characters meet in a small and frozen town stuck on a peninsula behind a mountain range. ‘What’s exciting about a small frozen chunk of isolated no-man’s land,’I pretend to hear you ask? Well, in this case, the town is host to a small magical gateway that leads to a much larger town, and acts as kind of a trading post for the peninsula and it’s inhabits. With a hook like that, characters drawn from all over the world — an elf scholar who came to visit the big city from his wooded homeland, a dragonborn mercenary from a rural mountain rookery — are given both a reason and the means to gather. But if we can get there, where else can we get? And *who* else has access to the portal?

Oh, I haven’t mentioned the invasion, the ambush, or the kobold slingers with their potions of explodey doom yet. But one of the neat things about D&D is that in the course of play, you always end up with more threads than you planned, and that just means there’s something to think about for next week. Adieu!

I spent a *lot* of time playing Mega Man 9 this weekend. More time than I probably should have. When did the game get so difficult? Every level is flush with spikes, pits, enemies that knock you into holes, and mini-bosses more difficult to kill than James Bond. After chugging through the whole thing for hours I finally know the boss order, but even that doesn’t help as the weapons have been seriously nerfed (remember killing Air Man in one go with the wood sheild? Or Shadow Man in 2 seconds with the top spin?). And just to double check, I played through Mega Man 2 + 3 to make sure that the game was in fact harder and that I wasn’t just suffering from Old Man Syndrome (it is, I’m not).

AND YET, despite all this, I don’t know if I’ve had more fun playing a video game for some time now. I don’t know what it is about Capcom, they keep making these impossible games that for nostalgia or whatever reason I can’t put down. They should keep up the good work!

This game has been getting a lot of press recently, and deservedly so. Remember Zelda 2, that weird side scrolling sequel for Zelda on the original NES? Well enter The Legend of Princess, the awesome what-if Super Nintendo follow up that never was, made by talented young developer Joakim Sandberg. It does a superb job of showing what Zelda could be like as a more modern side scroller, with Link running, jumping, hookshoting, and throwing chickens around a dungeon while trying to save a princess trapped in a crystal. The game has numerous references to the other Zelda games, like Link’s spin charge and dash, and those goddamn annoying bombchus.

The game is short, and is really one one level (the dirt temple) of what could be a much more encompassing and complete Zelda game. How awesome would it be if Nintendo would contact him about making a version of this for WiiWare? Too bad it will never happen, as Nintendo is super protective of its IP. Anyway, we should enjoy what we’ve got, it’s a great ride. Go download it here. See if you can beat my record of 1512 rupees!