The guest lecture we had this week at the university of Bolton was Jonathan Reilly, Creative Director at Inner-Freak. His lecture was very insightful where he spoke about his career and giving us advice for we enter the industry. The presentation he had for us was very interesting, he discussed how by utilised his knowledge of games art in the film industry. He also talked about how personal work be it, artists or designers, it can be great assets for us in the future to display our skills. One of the key points that caught my attention was when he said, ‘cutting corners if it means the result is good’. This interested me because the underlying message which I felt is that cutting corners could also be seen as adapting to that situation and overcoming that obstacle.

 

‘To many developers and outside observers, one thing is increasingly clear: the video game industry’s reliance on crunch is unsustainable, and hurts far more than it helps.’ (Schreier, J 2016)

 

What this shows is that the crunch is an impactful and regular occurrence within the games industry, and it causes distress but at the same time it’s become a part of the industry. When people talk to a someone from the games industry, one of the first questions that are frequently asked, is about the crunch. The fact that people are aware of this situation but still continue to manage, takes me back to what Jonathan Reilly said in his lecture that you can cut corners with certain aspects if it means that the overall result of the project is good. If you can get away with using techniques to shave time of the project by cutting corners then it is possible to overcome and deliver the end products even though it is hard for people to cut off parts of the work they would have been spending their time on.

 

 

 

References 

Schreier, J (2016). The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch. [ONLINE], Available at: http://kotaku.com/crunch-time-why-game-developers-work-such-insane-hours-1704744577

 

Jonathan Reilly, (2015). Photo [ONLINE]. Available at: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8b1ypRIYAAPsk6.jpg [Accessed 13 February 15].