After reading this post, 10 points to whoever gets the reference from the title and why.

Crunch mode is upon us. I’ve been busting ass over the last two weeks, trying to get the bugs out of the game, and tweak the food system to work properly. Saturday and Sunday were work days, and I expect that at least part of this Saturday and Sunday will be work days, as well (with the exception of some time spent at Great America this Saturday with Ei-Nyung’s work). The hours haven’t been insanely long, though, in part due to the commute, and in part due to actually going in on the weekends to knock the bug count down.

Still, even without really long hours, it’s been incredibly *intense* work. I ended up working on two of the more complicated, intertwined systems in the game – social interactions and food. While social interactions are reasonably straightforward, there were a *lot* of changes between this year and last – audio, camera, animation… lots of problematic areas. All in all, it’s actually not been too terrible, but still, it’s a system, and the bugs need to get worked out.

Food, on the other hand, interacts with so much stuff in such myriad ways, it’s *absurd*. I’ve been chasing a bug for *months* now, about people stealing food from other people, which leads invariably to a crash, when the person who had their food stolen tries to run a function on the food that’s no longer in their hand. Painful stuff, but I think I managed to lick it today.

The problem, as it’s always been, isn’t so much the work itself as the deluge of requests for information, verification, questions, need to ask others questions, etc. – because I’ve dealt with essentially these two major, yet almost totally disparate systems, and am the only remaining object engineer from last year, a lot of people end up asking me questions, or I need to deal with a lot of issues at any one time. Not to say that others don’t – not by a longshot. But I’m talking about my personal experience, and don’t mean to make it sound like I’m doing everything – I’m most certainly not.

But the point that I’m trying to get at is that every day is an intense barrage of information, from the moment I walk in the door until the moment I scramble out of the office. Literally nonstop for anywhere between 9 and 12 hours, and by the time I leave, I’m so mentally and physically fatigued that it’s almost impossible to get motivated to do anything at all in the evenings aside from just collapse into a tired, exhausted heap.

It feels genuinely weird, just because I’m so beat, yet I didn’t work like, a 14 hour day. Even on the “short” days, I feel like I spent the entire day getting punched in the brain.

Anyway – at most, there’s gonna be another week of pure intensity, then it should wind down into relatively relaxed mode, punctuated by bouts of extreme chaos. Those don’t tend to be so bad, all in all. I’m looking forward to that – I’m looking forward to a few moments to breathe, and relax, and actually feel rested and ready to go, instead of feeling like I’m constantly just trying to keep from being buried in an avalanche.

Oh – the good news – this year, my credit will be “Game Designer.” It was originally going to be a hybrid credit – “Game Designer/Object Engineer” – I feel like the second would be both more accurate, and what I *deserve*, because I designed *and* implemented a whole mess of features this year, and simply the design credit leaves out more than half of the work that I did. Still, I can’t complain too much. “Game Designer” is pretty much my Holy Grail of job titles, and when I managed to get hired at Maxis, I figured it would be at least three years before I’d even have a *shot* at the title. Now, less than two years later, I’ve got it.

The only thing sort of “more coveted” to me is the “lead designer” position, but frankly, I’m just not ready for it, to be perfectly frank – I need more experience. I’m not going to be the game design genius that makes all the right decisions right now. I feel like I know what I need to learn to *be* capable of fulfilling that role, but with the chaos and the responsibility of holding up some of the object engineering side, I simply didn’t get to pay as much attention to the details as I would have liked. Gimme another year, and I think I’d be ready to give it a go, though.

Anyway… yeah. To sleep, perchance to dream, then tomorrow, back to work.