[Developer Musings] Deadlines, Social Lives, and Satisfaction – RCMADIAX, Eden Industries, Frozenbyte talk about the stress of making games

Kai Tuovinen – Frozenbyte

Previous Works: Wii U owners may remember Frozenbyte for its Wii U eShop launch effort, Trine 2: Director’s Cut. The company’s previous games also include the original Trine, Shadowgrounds, and Shadowgrounds: Survivor.

Upcoming Games: Splot, described as “a colorful platformer featuring a cute small alien from outer space”, is due out sometime this year and is a possibility for Wii U.

Making games for us is doing what we love. We’re lucky to be in a position where we can focus on our creative work rather than worrying, but it hasn’t always been like that. Our company has been through its share of troubled times, but those times are now happily in the past.

Workload

There’s been a lot of talk in the games industry about crunch, working overtime, and having trouble with living ordinary lives due to ridiculous hours spent working on games.

At Frozenbyte, we’re not totally immune to these problems. We’ve made many adjustments to the way we work to relieve stress factors and workloads, and in fact we rarely allow overtime work, unless it’s absolutely necessary. A great example of when we’ve had to work overtime would be the Wii U and PS4 launches – we had launch titles for both consoles and had to meet certain deadlines to make it to the launch.

When we’ve aimed for console launches, the workload has been bigger, and often times we’ve had to work the weekends or late hours to be able to make certain deliverables ready in time. Personally I don’t mind it, because I’m working at a company and industry I wouldn’t swap for anything else, and games are my passion. I feel that everyone here has a similar mindset, and from what I can tell, our families are all supportive towards our work, so we’re very fortunate.

With the success of Trine and Trine 2, we’ve gained our financial independence from publishers, and as a result our only deadlines are internal ones, unless we’ve specifically agreed on something.

Workplace

Frozenbyte works hard at creating a work environment where you get to focus on your profession, so you don’t need to worry about other things. We’ve employed a professional catering staff for a few years now, and have our own kitchen, so we get to have breakfast and lunch every day at the office, and there’s always coffee and snacks available.

We also have things like a company van, that anyone here can reserve and use for moving stuff.  People have also used our company garage as temporary storage, so we try to help out everyone who works here in any way we can.

Hours

Our working hours are quite typical, most of us work between 8AM-4PM or 10AM-6PM, but we are often making adjustments based on people’s needs and their personal wishes. We are in a very global industry, so working odd hours is a typical phenomenon for those of us who deal with outside partners. I like to be aware of everything work-related even after I leave work, so I’ll read my e-mails on my phone until the moment I go to sleep. Overall we have a lot of flexibility with our working hours, and we think that results matter the most as long as you are doing your job and not disrupting everyone else’s workflow.

Stress

Making games has its share of stress-inducing factors. Whenever you’re about to reveal something new, whether it’s a new press release, new media materials, or releasing a new game itself, there’s always a set of expectations on the quality of your work. I think stress is very periodical in our industry, and mostly concentrated on these critical periods of game development.

Our team is very critical towards our own work. For example our marketing team ends up redoing a lot of the takes on our trailers. You rarely nail everything on the first implementation, and redoing your work multiple times takes its toll on people, and is definitely not for everyone.

Expectations

I think the biggest amount of stress for us comes from expectations related to our work.  Even though we have world-class people working here on art, code, design and QA, everyone feels the weight of expectations, especially now with our future projects yet to be announced. When you’ve made something successful, the following projects are always burdened with certain expectations, which can cause worry. Nevertheless, we have a lot of confidence in what we’re doing, and a healthy dose of stress can be very helpful. It’ll be an exciting as well as frightening experience to reveal our next projects!  Once something is out in the open though, we can finally relax and celebrate, and hope for a good reception.

Nintendo Everything would like to thank Michael Aschenbrenner, Ryan Vandendyck, and Kai Tuovinen for their valuable insight and for taking the time to contribute to our feature.