Crunch

Crunch is a term that originally referred to employees in professional game development taking on compulsory and consistent overtime, usually toward the end of a project or as resources ran out.

The term is often used in a broader sense to refer to generally unhealthy development practices around time management, applicable to VNdev-typical micro teams or solo development projects.

Avoiding Crunch

It is vital to avoid crunch, in order to lower the risk of burnout. For team sizes typical in VN development, or solo teams, this can look like:

• Making sure the scope of your game is reasonable for the amount of time & resources you have to complete it. If in doubt, cut scope. You can always add it back in later.
• Making a timeline with clear and achievable goals
• Avoiding sweeping creative or technical changes to the core of your game in the middle of development

Crunch culture has become a normalised practice in AAA game development. As smaller developers, it's important to work towards and maintain a healthy working culture, when slimmer resource margins and managerial inexperience can make it even more difficult.

Crunch and Game Jams

Crunch can be common in the setting of visual novel jams, often made worse by a strict deadline and the added pressure of watching other teams or developers working at the same time.

Participating in a game jam by encouraging yourself to meet a deadline is normal, however pressuring other participants to fulfill your poorly planned ideas on short notice is crunching. Towards the end of the jam, participants may hurry to finish a few elements, but they shouldn't be pulling all-nighters, neglecting their health, or encouraging others to do so in order to upload their game on time.

Because of the fixed deadlines that game jams have, crunching during them generally occurs due to underestimating the timeline of the development process. This is why it's important to not overscope the game's content and plan to finish the game before the actual deadline. This will allow time for beta testing, as well as for any unforeseen delays during development and when submitting to the jam. Things may go wrong with the game jam's host site during the submission process, so developers still need to budget time to actually submitting the game.

Perpetuating the mental and physical stress of crunching at the game jam level risks normalizing it on the broader scale of professional video game development, where crunching is used to exploit workers by overworking and underpaying them. Crunching actively harms people, does not provide any benefits or extra pay, nor does it protect workers from being laid off before or after a game is published.