The last episode of Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff had a great little segment on crunch, and what it means especially when it is, in practice, vastly left unused. I didn’t really agree with Robin’s theory on self-identification as “someone who plays crunchy games”, but I was definitely behind Ken’s take about the option to bring meaningful mechanics when they fit the narrative and the fun, while leaving them aside the rest of the time. You could see this as a story-driven way of handling crunch: nobody cares what kind of gas the Batmobile runs on except in that one episode in which the Joker plans to blow up Batman in his car. Nobody cares about fatigue and encumbrance rules until that one adventure that features a dangerous trek through the Endless Pits of Lava. Well… assuming you want that episode to be about perseverance and choices, of course. Like Ken, I have a fondness for GURPS and its sliding crunch scale, so that’s probably why I’m behind him on this.

But as I’ve been playing and chatting about more games in the past couple years than I ever did in the previous fifteen, I’ve been thinking about crunch a bit. And the more I think about it, the less I think it’s a simple sliding scale from “light-weight” to “crunchy”. In fact, so far, I’ve boiled it down to three axes: system crunch, silo crunch, and option crunch.

IGN has a very nice article and video about Project Hot Tub, which I worked on a bit as a Frostbite engine developer. I was part of the Frostbite cinematics team but at the time I was mostly working on the camera system (which got used on a couple projects like Anthem and one of the later Plants vs Zombie: Garden Warfare sequels… can’t remember which).

Hot Tub was gearing up to be a really fun game to work on. The kind of AAA-level game with a kid-friendly tone that you typically only find on Nintendo consoles. Remember when the most famous games were supposed to be fun, and not some gritty hyper realistic violence fest? Anyway, I was pretty sad when it got cancelled, especially given the circumstances outlined by IGN. This is the kind of stuff that happens in big corporations. Cheers to old friends who will probably get a bit nostalgic from seeing the game again.

By the way, you can see me and many other engine devs in the many shots IGN took from this Frostbite hiring/marketing video! Good times. I’m famous.