Crunch!

It’s that time again.  Crunch has arrived.  Working 60 hours weeks for almost a month now.

Crunch is a bizarre time.  13 hour days mean tempers can run high, and diminishing returns are an industry fact.  But it’s also like being in the trenches.  It’s when a studio bonds, and you get to know the programmer to your left and the artist to your right.  It’s when bright minds work together to creatively solve major problems.  Everyone pulls together to meet a sometimes seemingly impossible goal.  The studio buys dinner for you every night, and everyone laughs and jokes around for a bit.  You get home, pass out in your clothes, wake up and do it all again.  And eventually that title ships, and you have tangible proof it was all for something.

I’m finding crunch a lot easier to handle now that I’m in a junior design position.  Designing levels until 11:00 PM is a much more rewarding task than staying until 11:00 PM waiting to test the latest changes.  For me at least, no offense to my QA brethren.

Things seem to be going well though, so fingers crossed and knock on wood, crunch SHOULD end soon and I can have a life again!