I was wondering out of all the industry people who does cruch time, what it cosists of, what you get back and if you have noticed it getting less or more common over a long period of time.
It happens at my company about once every 4 months or so. Usually it's a few 10-14 hour days for a small stretch, or maybe a bit of Saturday work. Not fun, but not terrible. The bosses are usually cool, and buy us lunches/dinners during this time. After it is done, the generally let us shave some hours, or give us surprise 3 day weekend.
At Volition they feed us lunch and dinner.. and at the end of e3 crunch.. we got a few days off extra which was nice. At the end of projects its a little different. On punisher i got a week off. .. ok nothing like a month.. RiiiICK! hehe.
At Ensemble I worked here a year before we had any crunch. Our typical crunch lasts a week, the longest we've crunched so far has been 2 weeks. They cater lunch and dinner for us, and fridays are normal work days (so we only really crunch 4 of the 5 weekdays). We never work weekends.
Level designer, here. We get meals bought for us and crap like that. There is some work on the weekends, but there have only been about 5 or 6 weekends in the 10 months I've been working here. The other compensation we get is all time after 40 hours a week is converted directly into vacation time. I think I have about 200 hours in the bank. I'll probably take a month off at the end of the project.
I'm usually there for all the crunch periods, staying late with the programmers. It's only at the very end, when all the stability bugs are being worked out that it's only the programmers there.
As a tester on some projects and at MS, we would typically pull 50~65hour weeks for about 3~4weeks straight. Fuck that sucked, great OT pay if your a contractor. The salaried peeps get the shaft tho
Typically they sprung for dinner past 7pm and occasionally lunch on the weekends.
I havent worked a day of OT yet since ive been with GPG. God I love not doing crunch time.
At the end on SanAn we had takeaway meals of our choice on Monday and Friday, and chefs from a local restuarant came in and cooked for us on Wed-Thu. The kitchen was full of food for people that came in at the weekend.
I only live a few miles away from work, so when i do have to do crunch (rarely) I can still go home for dinner and come back without anyone noticeing. Also my wife and kids come by to visit which is always nice.
We put in a lot of crunch time at DE on the last project. I'm doing all I can to help us keep it to a minimum on the current one, so hopefully it's getting less common. During crunch, the company will usually order dinner if you work late, and there's food around at weekends. As recompense, we got 3 weeks off at the end of the project. Time will tell if we get those bonus's too
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We put in a lot of crunch time at DE on the last project. I'm doing all I can to help us keep it to a minimum on the current one, so hopefully it's getting less common. During crunch, the company will usually order dinner if you work late, and there's food around at weekends. As recompense, we got 3 weeks off at the end of the project. Time will tell if we get those bonus's too
Frankie: How is crunch at SD?
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Sorry for posting something unrelated. But saturnfive do you have MSN or ICQ? I recently had an interview @ DE Toronto and can't remember if we met while there. I *think we did.
If you don't like the occasional crunch time, I highly recomend working on handheld games. On all of the projects I've worked on thus far, (admitedly only a few) the art team has completely finished and moved onto a new project weeks before the coders catch up.
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Its common. Very common. What more is there you want to know? Perhaps you can just search and read the 20 other threads about crunch time.
-Just a thought
In 2 years as a character artist I never realy done big overtime. (you find way to recycle stuff and meet the deadline)
I always feeling bad for the level designer and level artist that stay 4+ hours
-bmer
Its not bad at all, but no crunch is even better.
I'm usually there for all the crunch periods, staying late with the programmers. It's only at the very end, when all the stability bugs are being worked out that it's only the programmers there.
Typically they sprung for dinner past 7pm and occasionally lunch on the weekends.
I havent worked a day of OT yet since ive been with GPG. God I love not doing crunch time.
Frankie: How is crunch at SD?
We put in a lot of crunch time at DE on the last project. I'm doing all I can to help us keep it to a minimum on the current one, so hopefully it's getting less common. During crunch, the company will usually order dinner if you work late, and there's food around at weekends. As recompense, we got 3 weeks off at the end of the project. Time will tell if we get those bonus's too
Frankie: How is crunch at SD?
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Sorry for posting something unrelated. But saturnfive do you have MSN or ICQ? I recently had an interview @ DE Toronto and can't remember if we met while there. I *think we did.