Thread by @Gaohmee

I don't know how much it is on people's minds right now but some of my circles are talking more about crunch conditions because of Cyberpunk and while I don't want to add to that specific discussion, some thoughts came up about understanding phases of development better:

There is talk especially about recent trends where many large-scale games have a particularly long pre-production phase and pushing the development of the actual content production far back into the last year or so of development before release, which often causes crunch.

Often referred to as "the grind", it is the most difficult part of many dev cycles because it's often devoid of any new creative stuff and requires a team to just "make the game", work through all the content creation which is kind of a trot and can be tough to get through.

Now, maybe it would help folks to understand these phases a little better to understand why this shift exists and why the content phase can get pretty difficult. Estimating the time content takes can get tricky because it depends on how well your pipeline works after all.

But first, pre-production. In short, this is where a team figures out the game. What makes this game unique, where does it innovate, what's the look, the style, the feel? It's where we prototype, where we throw out a ton of things before settling on something.

Note: not every studio does it this way, some have a more dedicated creative phase for that, so heads up here.

More importantly: It's where a team works out workflows ahead of content phase and actual production, so there is a lot to try and predict here.

You're trying to set yourself up for success in pre-production and build your workflows and systems in a way that is hopefully as flexible as possible later down the road. That's tough because you're predicting how you'll make content for a game 2-3 years down the road.

... I'll come back to this thread later, emergency over here...