Module 9 Work/Life Balance and Crunch
Crunch Time
This week's module is about work/life balance and crunch. Crunch is what can sometimes happen when a deadline is approaching. It involves working overtime in an attempt to increase efficiency. This only works if done in moderation. Otherwise, it will just cause work burnout and make the employees and the product suffer.
There is a game that illustrates crunch. Crunch Time is a digital card game on Steam that puts you in the shoes of a development team. The goal of the game is to finish all the tasks assigned to you (these are listed on the left side of the screen) before your opponent's team finishes their tasks. I played the game four times and lost the first three times due to bad luck. This game can be difficult or nearly impossible to win when certain card combos happen. This game explains crunch by its cards and their effects.
Screenshot of Crunch Time gameplay
There are five categories of workers you can hire on your development team:
Designer
Programmer
Artist
Sound Designer
Tester
There are both male and female workers for each job and different workers take different amounts of turns to complete tasks. (Based on the skill of the worker) Some of the names of the workers are references to other things, such as the artist Stan Li. The names of the workers are important because only one worker with a given name can be on the board at a time. It is possible and common to get a worker that your opponent already has in play. Because the person can only be assigned to one development team at a time, you would have to either remove him/her from play (resignation, getting fired, or sick leave) or wait until he/she completes his/her task.
There are cards that you can use to attack your opponent. These cards freeze your opponents workers and make them inactive. Some examples:
______ Bug- unavoidable, freezes all workers of that category for one turn. (Ex. Sound Bug)
Scrum- unavoidable, freezes all workers for one turn. (They are in a Scrum meeting)
Marketing attacks- unavoidable, same effect as Scrum.
You're Fired/Resignation- unavoidable, discard one of your opponent's workers.
Sick Leave- unavoidable, return an opponent's worker back to their hand.
Hunting for Resources- unavoidable, one of the most powerful cards in the game. Steal an opponent's worker and add them to your team.
Engine Crash- freezes all workers for one turn, can be avoided with the proper IT card.
Blackout/Server Down/No Connection- freeze all workers for several turns as indicated on the card, can be removed with the IT card "Johnny Fish". Really harmful if the you have to wait it out.
Publisher Calls- some of the most deadly attacks in the game. Effects vary from adding more tasks to removing completed ones. Can be avoided with a "Negotiator" card.
As was described above, IT cards and negotiator cards defend against attacks.
There are also cards that give you positive effects. These include advancing all active tasks by one turn, completing all active tasks, unlocking the ability to place workers from more than one department in a turn, and removing a task by the card "Outsourcing" (choose a task from the left side of the screen and remove one from the counter.) The screenshot shown near the top of this page has sound at 0/0 because I used an "Outsourcing" card. Normally, all tasks are required with a minimum requirement of 1 and it is random depending on the game. Each time you start the game, you and your opponent are assigned to a randomized game project with different requirements depend on the game. For instance, the football game I was assigned to only needed one sound task done originally.
What does this game teach you?
Crunching is generally not worth it. Sure you may get lucky and complete all of your tasks, but this is rare. (It is rare in the game, too.) Crunching makes you much more likely to generate bugs, which make tasks take longer while they are being fixed. (Bugs are the most common attack in the game.) Other problems can occur as well, such as engine crashes, network outages and blackouts that require a dedicated IT support team, or it will take longer to fix the problems and the workers will be unable to work. Getting calls from the publisher will upset you as it adds more tasks and makes the game take longer to develop. The publisher can also throw away a task because they didn't like it, even though you spent over 5 hours working on it.
There is a limit to how many people you can have on a team. You can only assign tasks to a single department at a time, but you can assign it to multiple people within that department. (In the game you can only place workers from one department per turn, but you can place more than one worker from that department. For example, you can play two artists in one turn but not an artist and a programmer.)
In conclusion, this game does a good job of illustrating game development through a fun card game. Sadly, the game is single player only vs. a CPU. It would be nice to have multiplayer. Also, you cannot edit or build your deck, you use what the game gives you. Both of these were probably intentional. It is possible that the developers themselves were crunching and had to cut multiplayer to meet a deadline.
Crunch Time Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/340550/
My gameplay video (approximately 17min. 1080p 60fps) (403 MB) (OneDrive Link):
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AiFN_Go9RHsPhEPg119bgNuwK1Kq
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