Scope, crunch and looking after the team

Just one more feature

Hyper Shards 2 has a plan: a demo for Steam Next Fest in 10 weeks. Then the list starts growing. "Online co-op!" "A photo mode!" "A pet robot!" Each idea sounds small. The deadline stays where it is.

Scope is everything a game will contain. Scope creep is scope growing bit by bit while the time and the team stay the same. Every feature costs far more than its coding time: art, testing on every device, bug fixes, translation and patch notes, in every update, forever.

Must, should, could, not now

A planning method from 1990s software projects, called MoSCoW, sorts every feature into four groups:

• Must: without it, there is no game.
• Should: important, but the game still works without it.
• Could: nice extras, if time is left.
• Won't this time: our not now list.

The Agile Business Consortium, which looks after the method, advises keeping Musts to about 60% of the effort, so Shoulds and Coulds become the safety cushion. The not now list keeps ideas safe for version 2.1 or the next game.

Timeboxes and the smallest good version

A timebox fixes the time and lets the scope bend. When the time is up, we ship what is finished and polished, and the rest moves to the not now list. The deadline never stretches quietly.

We start with a minimum viable version: the smallest version that still delivers the core fun. For the demo: one ship, five waves, one boss, done well.

Estimates are usually too hopeful, so we add a buffer. Douglas Hofstadter joked that things always take longer than you expect, "even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law".

What crunch is

Crunch means long stretches of overtime, late nights and weekends, to hit a deadline. Studios slide into it when the date is fixed (a festival, a sale, paid marketing) but the scope kept growing, or big problems showed up late.

It is a real, well-known industry problem. The IGDA, an association of game developers, asks about it in its Developer Satisfaction Survey. In its 2023 survey of 777 developers, 28% said their job involved crunch. In 2020, Bloomberg reported that the studio making Cyberpunk 2077 required six-day weeks before launch, after saying it would avoid crunch.

Why crunch backfires

• More mistakesTired people make more bugs, and fixing them eats the time crunch was meant to save. A well-known 2005 IGDA essay, "Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work", made exactly this case.
• HealthA 2021 study by the WHO and the International Labour Organization linked working 55 or more hours a week with a 35% higher risk of stroke, compared with 35 to 40 hours.
• People leaveWorn-out developers quit, and their know-how leaves with them.
• The game can still flopCrunch does not guarantee a good launch: Cyberpunk 2077 still shipped with serious bugs on older consoles (the QA passes and bug tracking lesson in Stage 7 tells the story).

A pace we can keep

• School firstStudio time fits around school, homework, sport and family, never the other way round.
• Sleep and breaksThe CDC says children aged 6 to 12 need 9 to 12 hours of sleep a night. Every so often, stand up, move and look away from the screen.
• Saying no"Not now" is a complete answer: to ideas, to players and to each other.
• Celebrate small winsBeat the boss bug? Merged a tricky fix? Say so in the team chat. Progress is easier to feel when we name it.
• Ask for helpStuck for a long time? Ask a teammate, a parent or Claude. Asking is a skill, not a weakness.

Professional teams talk about a sustainable pace: a speed the team could keep up for months, not days. Our studio is young developers working with a parent, so looking after each other is part of the job.

Burnout: spot it early

The World Health Organization describes burnout as what happens when work stress builds up and is never dealt with: feeling exhausted, feeling distant or negative about the work, and getting less done.

Watch for signs in yourself and each other: dreading a project you used to love, snapping at teammates, poor sleep, headaches, nothing feeling fun. If you notice them, stop and talk to a parent or another trusted adult. It goes both ways: parents get worn out too, from their own jobs plus the studio. A good team notices, and slows down together.

Bolt says: The best studios make many games over many years. Next: product management, deciding which work is worth doing at all.