Originally published in print September 2020
The last six months have brought many changes to the world of entertainment, with creative fields almost grinding to a complete halt. However, while the theatres, film sets and music venues all went dark, game developers’ computer screens continued to shine. This is not to say that COVID-19 and the move to remote working has not affected the industry, the delay of The Last of Us: Part Two, and Cyberpunk 2077 has shown us this. But this moment of pause affords us the opportunity to examine how games are made and wonder if things should change.
Like most of us, many studios have struggled to transition to remote working. Supergiant Games has spoken at length with NoClip about the difficulties of working far apart from their team while releasing version 1.0 of their game Hades. Creative director Greg Kasavin specifically mentions the lack of spontaneous conversations between the team and the difficulties of maintaining a healthy work/life balance as part of this rough transition. This is echoed by one team member who showed the four inches of space between his work filing cabinet and bed in the credits footage of the video. Most upsettingly, while studio director Amir Rao hopes everyone in his team is doing well, he cannot say for certain that they are. Although Supergiant Games and Hades are in no way at the scale of an AAA developing team or game, their struggles with continuing to work remotely can only be scaled up when looking at bigger teams and projects.
Unfortunately, even in The Before Times, work/life balance was not a new issue within the games industry. Toxic workplace environments along with mismanagement more often than not culminate in unforgiving periods of crunch before release. Some notable examples being Red Dead Redemption 2’s 100-hour work weeks prior to release (as revealed by The New York Magazine).CD Projekt Red also admitted to investors in January that even despite their (then) 5 month delay until September, crunch time would still be necessary to release Cyberpunk 2077 on time (as reported by Polygon). The game has since been delayed until November 2020 and it is almost certain that the people working on it are facing another few grueling months of crunch. The adage goes, If you love what you do, you never truly work a day in your life, but I would argue that the romanticisation of late hours at the computer and ignoring sleep, your health, and your family, to release a game on time benefits no one except the investors that finance these projects. Most worryingly, however, between remote working, the lack of clear delineation between work and rest, and the loss of the camaraderie of the team in the office, there is a significant risk that development crunch could be more damaging than ever before.
So if working from home is not the way towards a better working environment in game design, what is our route forward? I would suggest we cast our eyes to the indie sphere, where small development teams work on creating tailored game experiences rather than unsustainable one-size-fits-all games. Two games that spring to mind for this are the indie darlings Undertale and Stardew Valley. Both games were created primarily by one person, with Eric Barone (Concerned Ape) for Stardew Valley and Toby Fox for Undertale, and both games had similarly long production times. Out of good, quick, and cheap, the accepted logic is that you can only pick two, and for these developers, they picked good and cheap. By working on the games by themselves, they could maintain strong creative control over the projects, and by choosing a pixel art style they could avoid the time and cost of rendering in 3D, however because of this both projects had long development times. Undertale being in development for 32 months and Stardew Valley is still being updated today despite Barone beginning work on the project in 2012.
Considering how long those development cycles were, I propose that an even more sustainable approach to game design could be found in the tiny game, for example Grace Bruxner’s Frog Detective games. Bruxner has been designing games for over 4 years now, all of them short comedic games that rely on clever writing and inventive design to entertain their audience through their short run times. Her two Frog Detective games, The Haunted Island, and The Case of the Invisible Wizard only take an hour each to play, but each line will bring a smile to your face, along with the visual comedy of the games’ worlds and the magnifying glass in which you examine it. Bruxner and her team spent 5 months on the first game, and divided the writing, programming and composition of the music amongst herself and her two team members. Bruxner also has an attitude towards games that they should be fun to make and that will be ready for release in their own time, with the time between the gameplay trailer of The Invisible Wizard and it’s release being only 5 days. This promotional strategy fundamentally rejects the typical hype driven video game advertising, and certainly lessens the stress on the small development team.
All in all, I love games, but it has reached a point where the majority of them are made through unsustainable and damaging systems. As much as I was excited for the release of Cyberpunk 2077, I don’t know if I can in good conscience support a company that has forced its workers into so many months of unnecessary crunch. If smaller dev teams, with less focus on graphical fidelity and a shift in attitude to “it’s ready when it’s ready” is what it takes to help remedy these unhealthy attitudes around work, I am absolutely ready for this change. And if it means we see more inventive, stylistic, short form games like The Haunted Island, A Frog Detective Game that’s just the icing on the cake.
