Crunch has long been a hot topic of debate in the AAA gaming space. Well, to be honest, it's a hot topic across the entire game development spectrum. In recent months and years we've seen Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last of Us Part II come out in the wake of some striking reports regarding the working conditions at Rockstar and Naughty Dog alike; and Cyberpunk 2077 has been criticised before its release for CD Projekt Red admitting they have to crunch to get the game finished.
But not every big game comes out after a period of extreme working hours, of course. In the summer of 2019, Nintendo announced it was delaying the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons - our game of the year so far - into 2020 to avoid subjecting its developers to crunch. And as part of a new NoClip documentary exploring his design philosophy, cult Japanese developer Goichi Suda, aka Suda51, has spoken about his attitude to crunch. Or rather, his total dismissal of the practice.
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Related: Check out GAMINGbible's interview with Suda51 at Gamescom 2019
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Suda - who is the CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture - said that "unnecessary overtime is simply not allowed at all" at his studio - which is currently working on No More Heroes III for the Nintendo Switch. He added:
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"If you work too much overtime, first you get a warning saying, 'Hey, chill a bit. Be sure to take off Saturday and Sunday, and go home on time and everything.' So, you know, we have a set schedule, set working hours, and it sort of makes it easier to automatically hit that work-life balance."
Suda has made a name for himself through a series of quirky, wholly cult-concern titles, from the visual-novel puzzler The Silver Case to the action-orientated No More Heroes, Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw. More recently he directed a third, spin-off game in the No More Heroes franchise, Travis Strikes Again, but its multi-style approach wasn't so warmly received by critics as mainline entries in the same series.
One of his most acclaimed games, 2005's Killer7, finally received a PC port in 2018 after originally releasing for PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube, and has an "overwhelmingly positive" review ranking on Steam. And rightly so - it's a wonderfully odd, compellingly surreal thing, that everyone should play.
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Back to crunch, though, and Suda told the NoClip team: "Even if you wanted to, we're not allowed to do all the work that so many developers are kind of forced to do, just by the nature of their work. At Grasshopper, it's a bit easier to keep that work-life balance than it is at a lot of companies."
"I've really been trying for a while," he continues, "but especially right now, I'm trying my best to make Grasshopper an environment in which people can have fun creating and developing games. I want people to think: 'Wow, working at Grasshopper is fun'. Working on games, developing games here is actually fun, so I'm working on trying to realise that sort of environment for a company."
Which is all rather refreshing, isn't it? Especially after seeing CDPR admit the Cyberpunk 2077 team would have to crunch in order to get the game finished - and that was for its September 17th release, not the revised November 19th one. And we can say, after meeting the man, that Suda is a lovely chap, so we're not super surprised that he aims to keep his staff as happy as can be.
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Related: watch our tl;dr video on game development crunch, and why it needs to change...
Featured Image Credit: Grasshopper Manufacture
Topics: Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar Games, Nintendo, Cyberpunk 2077, The Last of Us Part 2, Interview, Naughty Dog