A colleague recently asked me a straight forward question that piqued my interest. Right after I revealed my latest iPhone app to him, CrunchTime™, he asked, “Why would I need that ?” The application is designed to help improve the quality of life for anyone who has a job. Is working unpaid overtime so routine in our industry, so much so that my colleague is used to it and just accepts it, causing him to not understand why an app would be created to address the constant grind of working long hours for extended periods of time? While still curious about the reason for the question I responded, “Because it will help improve your work-life balance and give you more time to do the things you love.”
Later I realized what he meant to ask was “What does the app do ?” So I’d like to answer that question and share more information about the functionality of the app along with the reasoning and some the back-story behind creating CrunchTime™ and the many features that can be found within the app.
We are an industry full of intelligent problem solvers, creativity, and talent - why not use some of it to repair one of the most self-destructive practices of our industry? Effective planning & working smarter, not crunching, in-order to complete tasks is a large part of the solution. Crunching is an easy way to quickly burnout your talent, kill morale, and it does not result in an increase in product quality. There are countless studies and reports on the ill-effects of working long hours for an extended period of time, however, there are many companies that still believe crunching is something unavoidable in order to hit tight deadlines. Even with all the crunching taking place in the video game industry I’ve managed to talk to employees on teams working at Blizzard and other companies that claim they haven’t crunched in years, get paid for overtime, and still make high quality games within their schedule. The result is happier employees that stay with the company longer and produce better games. I can only hope more companies adopt such practices but we, as employees, shouldn’t rely solely on the companies to bring about change. We first need to change how we as individuals think and act in regards to participating in crunch.
I started working at EA right when the EA_Spouse blog post and class action lawsuit between EA and, coincidentally, a former school-mate of mine was settled. It was interesting to experience the changes that came from the $15.6 million settlement and watch the company rapidly become a better place to work due to their renewed efforts on improving the work-life balance of their employees. The whole work environment transformed into a healthier and happier place. After a couple of games at EA Redwood Shores, now Visceral, I began work on Dead Space which is the best game development experience I’ve had thus far. Sure it had its share of development challenges but thankfully prolonged crunch was not one of them.
When I talk about the development of Dead Space many people are surprised to hear that I did not crunch at all in three years on the project. It’s quite sad to me knowing that some people read that statement and think that is a bad thing, as if to say that if you’re not crunching then you’re not working hard enough. Those people are the ones holding back change. The absence of Crunch on Dead Space was due to an amazing team, that worked extremely efficiently together, one of the best environment leads I have ever worked with, and in large part, due to a change in how I viewed crunching. I knew that if I wanted to stay in this industry I needed to have a good work-life balance. EA also recognized this and became very conscious of how many work hours teams were requesting of their employees. There were times that I stayed late simply because I loved what I was working on but it was never because someone else wanted me to work late or come in on the weekend. It was after moving on from EA that I found myself crunching more than ever in my nine years as a professional game developer.
I love making games but I began to question how long I would stay in an industry that seems not to care about the health and well being of the same employees that make the industry successful. I wanted to make a change. I wanted to make an app that allowed the user to track and displayed how long you were working overtime in comparison to spending time on other areas in your life, I wanted to make an app that showed the top 10 crunching companies for that month, I wanted and app where you could add your colleagues onto a ‘friends list’ and easily communicate with them so you can send them messages like,”Go home already.” I wanted an app that showed the effect of crunching on your health, sleep, and mood while making all this data transparent with easy to read charts & graphs, I wanted an app that gave you achievement badges for accomplishing work-life balance goals, and most of all I wanted to make an app that made people aware while helping to improve their quality of life and giving them more time to do the things that make them happy. So I made CrunchTime™.
The app is divided into 9 main areas represented by icons. Some icons have sub menus which let you access different functions.
THE ICONS
Charts: Shows you information about your work
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