The development of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga took the software house TT Games long periods from crunch, which frustrated employees not a little, at least according to a long report by Polygon, based on the testimonies of more than thirty employees and former employees of the company, who naturally wanted to remain anonymous to avoid legal repercussions, having signed NDAs.
According to their stories, already in 2017 many developers were at loggerheads with the company for the crunch it forced them to. So the development of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, the most ambitious LEGO title, began, but nothing seems to have changed at the organizational level and the crunch has returned.
Some testimonies speak of veiled threats sent to employees, with hints of “possible problems” in case they don’t start working overtime.
TT Games executives had promised that things would improve with the development of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and the use of a new in-house created graphics engine, NTT, but in reality the crunch hasn’t been alleviated and indeed, things got worse.
The development of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga would have been particularly problematic, because it was plagued by the flight of the developers and by the changes in the management of the project, which not for nothing has been postponed several times after the announcement two years ago.
According to the stories, the foundation of the TT Games crunch culture dates back to 2005, after the success of Lego Star Wars, which led to the decision to launch a Lego game per year, with terrible repercussions for the workers and with oppressive behavior on the part. of executives. For example, Jon Burton, one of the founders of the company and creative director of Lego games, was famous for yelling back at those who quit their jobs at the end of their contract hours. Other executives followed employees as they left work, asking their reasons and questioning their loyalty.
According to many, the crunch was simply premeditated, i.e. it was part of the production planning and was not intended as an emergency measure.
But things have not improved with the departure of Burton, who was succeeded by David Dootson in 2013 and, therefore, Paul Flanagan in 2018 (until 2020). With all executives, the crunch was taken for granted.
The report goes on to tell about the problems encountered using the engine NTT, which at the beginning of the development of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga was unstable and lacked many essential features, which led to the loss of a great deal of work. The developers had asked to use the Unreal Engine, but the company refused because it did not want to pay the license to Epic Games. On top of that, much of the pre-production work would have been thrown away because it was based on the previous engine and unusable with the new one.
In short, the problems would have been many. Who knows what reflections they might have had on the final quality of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga.
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