Jobye-Kyle Karmaker

Thread 2/7 — are very vigilant and try to mitigate crunch as much as they can. e.g. several months ago, around the time we started WFH, our Olympus schedule was feeling incredibly tight and we were feeling stressed and some felt the need to crunch to not let our deadlines slip.

Thread 3/7 — When the leads and Env Art Director caught wind of this through our late check-ins and people voicing this stress, they took immediate and swift action to take another hard look at the schedule, make smart cuts, move things around, enlist additional support, etc.

Thread 4/7 — All with the goal of creating more buffer in all of our schedules and for us to feel less pressure to deliver on such tight deadlines, make room for us take extra time on a task if needed (always unforeseen things that pop up) and not have to feel the need to crunch.

Thread 5/7 — Given the fluid nature of game dev, crunch isn’t something you mitigate once — it’s something you actively need to monitor and scope against accordingly. Crunch is avoidable, but need to put in the work to avoid it. I appreciate that our leads do that actively.

Thread 6/7 — As a result of all our leads’ scoping, closing out Olympus was actually smooth on the Env Art side due to all the buffer they secured. We had almost 2+ months where we could, do nothing but bug fix/polish our respective areas without it being a crazy crunch.