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Author: Tj'ièn Twijnstra

Thoughts on 996 (aka Crunch)

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 07/11/2025

I love my work and I work a lot. Yes, I feel that I have to, because I feel responsible for our team, for our game, for our publisher who’s placing a lot of trust in us and our game and I’m ambitious and eager to succeed. But I crunch when I feel like it. In our team, no-one is ever forced to crunch, nor is it expected. We repeat to ourselves and each other that we do not need to crunch.

I used to think crunch very much avoidable and is all due to bad planning, and to an extend it is. You always have to factor in that things take longer and that game development is very dynamic. But it’s not that simple. Ambitions and aspirations won’t be tamed that easily and having a drive to succeed is an unstoppable force.

But 996 (working from 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week) is extremely unhealthy, even for a single week, especially if it’s mandated and expected but you planned for 955. In our team, if we feel we’re running behind schedule, we reprioritize and focus on the things we can finish and replan for the things that fall of the schedule. So not only do you need to plan realistically, expect dynamic development and ambitious team members, you also need to be flexible and adept to any situation to make sure crunch is not considered a tool.

Crunch is avoidable and should be avoided, but crunch if you feel like it on a personal level.

Always Optimize Tools

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 25/10/2025

I’ve been working in the game’s industry for about 2 decades now and I’ve come to learn is that one of the best things a team can do is to optimize their tools. Any tool that helps facilitate the game development process is worth optimizing, but most specifically the tools that create the content that is directly consumed by the players.

Many readers of this blog will know from experience that second-to-second gameplay, levels, missions, challenges, cut-scenes, narrative intersection bits, music, sound effects, controls and everything else the player experiences in your game will become better with iteration. The more designers go through the process of playing and improving the better the experience becomes. Nintendo famously calls this process “finding the fun”, and that’s exactly that. Fun needs to be discovered in the game you’re creating.

Games are almost exclusively created in a high stress, pressure cooker environment and in many studios there is hardly any room to play. But playing your own game while questioning what will make it better, what will make it more fun, how to surprise the player is vital. After you made some adjustments, some tweaks or some experiments it vital to play again and again. But in a pressure cooker environment, nobody has time for that, I hear you say

That’s why you need great tools! Great tools reduce effort and create time within your project that you wouldn’t have without them. Great tools afford more iterations and inevitably make a game more fun.

There’s another superpower that I can attribute to tools and that is that they motivate! Nothing kills the motivation of an intelligent person more than repeating boring work, repeating hard to imagine setups and long waiting times between adjustments and experiencing the adjustments in the game environment. The faster the designers can round trip between their adjustments and the experience, the more motivated the designer will be to do the experimentation and playing required to actually “find the fun”.

The AI Counter Wave

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 18/10/2025

Our relationship with AI is still very much in development, like our relationship with other technologies, it will be shaped by time and usage. Take our smart phones, we seemingly can’t live without it, but school and parents seem to try and keep our kids away from them – at least for a while. AI is a different beast all together, but pros and cons are discussed daily everywhere. It seems that the technology is fundamental and it already affects many peoples lives.

It seems there’s a double standard that many are not aware of they possess. For instance, I noticed how recruiters and managers seem to praise AI in their work. Summarizing batches of resumes, auto filtering great from good candidates and offloading batches of work to optimize their workflow. AI is great! But when candidates use AI to write the perfect cover letter, create position based resumes and extraordinary motivations, recruiters and managers seem to hate and automatically deny the application. This is a double standard where the technology seems to be both great and very bad at the same time and in many cases this double standard isn’t felt by the person who possesses it.

But I think this double standard provides a clue to what the counter wave of AI will be. I believe all things come in pairs of opposites. Light and darkness exist only in relation to each other, like noise and silence, like chaos and order. AI will create a zest for CounterAI, the deeply personal, the things that exist because of effort and human suffering. The recruiter and managers that make their work impersonal and soulless by using AI to sift through their candidates demand heartfelt personal motivational letters and carefully crafted resumes with a clear human touch. AI will expose the need for humans to grow through hardship, suffering, commitment and purpose. Like microwave meals make you hungry for your mother’s favorite dish, so to will AI make you hungry for the purpose full and human.