Launching Pad blog
A little bit of crunch…
By the end of today, we’re hoping to have our new Flash version of The Pretender presentable enough to enter into the 2BeeGames Indie Game Competition. Are we going to make it by the deadline? I think so. We’ll certainly be calling our entry a ‘work in progress’, but at this stage it looks like the game (even incomplete) will hang together as a whole just fine. We’re pleased! I particularly like the artwork produced by the talented Vin Rowe.
The last two weeks have been gruelling; I’ve taken time off from my day job and have been working I-don’t-even-know-how-many hours a day coding and producing audio. Tristan has been devoting every last spare moment to design and writing, and Vin has been putting in a superhuman effort despite being desperately ill.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I despise the macho stay-up-all-night, work-until-you’re-a-burned-out-husk culture that has grown up around game development. It’s terribly wrong that some mainstream game studios have come to rely on months of crunch time. In fact, if games are — as some say — stuck in perpetual adolescence, perhaps the reason is that only a certain adolescent exuberance can get a developer through that many 16-hour days? I’m only mostly joking.
That said, over a shorter period, working your butt off to get something ready can be surprisingly rewarding. So yes, despite my headache from a relentlessly cooked brain, despite the housework piling up and despite the frozen meals my (amazingly supportive) wife and I have had to live off for the last week, it’s worth it because I get to see this game metamorphose from ‘fairly fun’ into ‘pretty special’. And that’s worth a little bit of hard work.
