Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from Weixin Official Accounts: Touch Music (ID: chuappgame), author: Zhu Siqi

Time to have a little bit of happiness.

this year's national day holiday is "as long as" eight days due to the consecutive holidays of mid autumn festival and national day. Overall, it gives people a sense of revival: walking down the street, shops that have been deserted and closed for various reasons in recent years seem to have come back to life, and food streets and restaurants line up. According to news reports, the number of people traveling during the National Day holiday this year reached 800 million, a record high in several years. Under somewhat depressing circumstances, holidays seem to be rare moments to brighten people's lives.

However, no matter what, there will always be some people who actively or passively stay at work, including game practitioners. The game industry has always been perceived as "volume," manufacturers regardless of size, overtime is commonplace; Independent developers work at a pace closer to freelancers, and do not strictly distinguish between work and life, and overtime on holidays is naturally common.

So, how did practitioners spend this holiday? If they're working overtime, what are they doing? Touch music found several different manufacturers, different types of work, but all experienced holiday overtime practitioners, and they talked about this holiday experience.

About 2 years ago, almond gave up the Offer of the game factory and chose to start his own business. He now has his own game studio. During the National Day, he has been working, even refining the work content to every day. Part of this has to do with the time pressure on the project: Almond's project received perks from school students starting businesses, including a start-up grant and free use of office space for a limited time. He wanted to make the most of this precious offer.

Almond's project at hand has taken shape, and there is a playable game Demo. Although it had not yet reached the stage of formal commercialization and investment, in the first two days of the holiday, Almond still summarized some experiences, wrote a report on the characteristics and direction of the game, and produced a supporting PPT. "Although it doesn't seem to help game production, it's hard to get investment in the current environment, but one more person knows that the game is more likely to hatch successfully. "Almond is still thinking long term.

Almond then spent a day and a half modifying the content of the proposal, and another day and a half simply sifting through player feedback on the Demo and making simple changes to the game in response to that feedback. "I just changed some bugs and unnecessary feature designs that are easy to fix, and the rest may have to wait for other colleagues to discuss together after the holiday," almond said."How to change them depends on the cost of the team. "

Behind the increasingly vigorous independent games, there are still some problems in the hard-working small and medium-sized manufacturers and developers 'games, which need professional technical art to solve. Almond's team didn't have such a person at the moment, so he spent half a day making a recruitment poster with game images and studio logos. Posters were sent out in the morning, and several resumes were received sporadically in the afternoon. Most of them were students interested in the game. Almond also served as HR, contacting them one by one to understand the specific situation.

One after another, the holiday was coming to an end. On the last day before rework, Almond summarized the current problems of the game again, hoping to have a meeting with his colleagues the next day to clarify the optimization direction of the game. Fortunately, everyone in the studio had a tacit understanding now, so he didn't need to spend any more time doing PowerPoint to explain things more clearly.

When can I rest? At the end of the holiday, Almond turns off the studio lights for the last time, even if it doesn't last for a few hours. "There is no real vacation for entrepreneurs. 'he said.

The company's copywriting plan is "!" "This is the most common sentence Zhou Zhou said during the eleventh period.

On October 6, Zhouzhou took the shuttle bus to work in the company. She calculated her work schedule in the car: if he continued to work during the 11 th holiday, he would only work overtime until 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. every day for a period of time after the holiday; if he took a break during the 11 th holiday, he would work until the early hours of the morning every day after rework.

"Work until dawn" is always a bit shocking, but as a game practitioner, Zhouzhou has long been used to it. She worked as a copywriter for the launch project of a large factory in Guangzhou. In the past six months, nearly 70% of her days have been left in the early hours. After work, she walked out of the company and took a taxi with WeChat. The taxi fare was reimbursed by the company.

During the probation period, Zhouzhou's workload is mostly "voluntary." The company's probation period is 6 months, but Zhouzhou "performs well," less than 3 months into the job successfully became a regular, which led to her workload on the basis of the probation period increased some. After becoming a regular employee, Zhouzhou found that his daily workload could not be finished overtime until the early morning, and accumulated more and more. She tried to consult with her supervisor, who was also in a difficult position because of the pressure from higher levels to schedule the project. Fortunately, these conversations were not completely ineffective. After chatting twice, Zhou Zhou's workload decreased slightly.

Even though overtime was a common occurrence, like many game companies, Zhouzhou's company did not have an overtime pay system. However, in fact, vacation only exists in the regulations, Zhouzhou's work is full every day, there is no way to rest. At most, you can only work overtime the first day and arrive late the next day: if you work overtime until 3 a.m. the first day, you can work at 1 p.m. the next day.

At the beginning of September, a colleague in the same group as Zhouzhou left his post and handed over all his work to Zhouzhou. When the supervisor asked if she had any questions, she replied,"Barely. "The supervisor asked what the specific problem was, but she couldn't say it, just said that it was a bit sudden and hoped to postpone the September work" dead line ". The supervisor did not agree with Zhou Zhou's opinion, so she had to take over the work of her former colleague according to the arrangement.

In such an environment, it is common for people to leave. Zhouzhou in communication with peers found that in Guangzhou,"overtime to sudden death" is regarded as a common thing. If you want to relieve the pressure, it means you have to leave Guangzhou. "If you can't accept it, leave. "This is a phrase Zhou Zhou's friends often hear. They jokingly call Guangzhou" the darkest place in China's game industry." Some friends really left, leaving the original company, leaving Guangzhou. Zhou Zhou found that there were fewer and fewer people around him who could talk.

It seems that only Guangzhou game company circle has the saying of "three pits"

Under Zhouzhou's careful planning, she can take a complete vacation for 2 days during the National Day holiday. She wanted to rest, but it rained heavily in Guangzhou for several days, and the thunder kept her awake. She turned on her phone and calculated the balance in her account. If she wanted to leave her job or be laid off, she needed to leave enough money and deposit equivalent to three months 'rent and one month's living expenses.

The remaining six days, Zhouzhou lunch will go to the company overtime to evening, only the morning time is her own. She likes to sit in a coffee shop and update her online serial novels-a common sideline for copywriters, earning extra money on the one hand and building portfolios on the other. Such moments should have been her rare respite, but the rain was too hot for her to concentrate on the plot of her novel.

"Oh, my God! "Zhou Zhou said.

Ji Feng, a platform operator on duty, was operating a large gaming platform. Before the long holiday began, he felt more than one manufacturer's desire for a holiday.

Ji Feng's daily work is mainly divided into two aspects. One is to accept materials from game manufacturers and publishers and publish them to the corresponding resource positions on the platform. Popular games, recommended games, leaderboards and other information that players can see on the website are uploaded and published by platforms such as Ji Feng. The second is to select media articles worth reading published on the platform and push them to players three times a day.

The intensity of these daily tasks is usually not particularly great. Generally speaking, three to five game materials would be delivered to him every day, and he would be able to handle them quickly. But before the holiday, that is, September 27, 28 two days, more than 20 game materials like snowflakes to him, hit him a surprise.

"Obviously, everyone wants to arrange their work early and devote themselves to holidays..." Ji Feng was a little amused. After all, many players only have time to play games intensively and pay attention to game information during the holidays, but during this time, manufacturers also want to take holidays. This brought some contradictions to his work.

For manufacturers and operators, the activity time of many platforms does not always take care of the rhythm of domestic holidays because it is impossible for operators to finish their work ahead of schedule. Take the three daily tweets, for example, to try to ensure that it is the freshest content, Ji Feng and colleagues need to be on duty. Monsoon was allotted two days on duty.

This task is a bit more cumbersome than weekdays: the media that usually publish content on the platform also have to take a vacation, and there is a lot less content to choose from. Ji Feng had no choice but to scour through the many past issues for something worth reading and sending out. Although the shift work was not heavy on the whole, it was obviously impossible for him to have a whole block of time to rest.

Besides, Monsoon had another, more important task. During the National Day holiday period, a platform-based game will be put on shelves in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, China. There are a lot of materials to be publicized, so all of them need to be uploaded in advance, and sufficient resource slots should be given. This meant that from the moment the game was released to the next day, he had to watch all kinds of promotional pictures and videos to see if they were in place, how the players were doing in the game community, whether the game was released smoothly, whether it could be downloaded normally... From 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., he rarely left the computer.

The game's release date was stuck in the middle of the holiday season, forcing Ji Feng to cancel his planned trip. But for him, who had caught a cold just after his holiday and had been tossing around for a week, not being able to go out became a mixed blessing. In fact, compared with other manufacturers, other posts of normal overtime, monsoon feel this occasional extra work intensity can be accepted_coincidentally, just arrived at work days, illness will be cured, this makes him a little laugh: Is he the legendary "heaven selected workers"?

The practitioners we share stories with are just the tip of the iceberg in the gaming industry, but they may represent the general status quo of slightly younger practitioners: still energetic and able to survive, not too much family pressure, trying to establish themselves in big cities. For them, it is most important to grasp what can be grasped at present under unstable conditions and find ways to stay in the industry.

As for the rest--the Mid-Autumn Festival did not cause them too much trouble, but saved them the trouble of going back and forth; and compared with traveling or other entertainment, a good sleep between busy work was the greatest relaxation. Unfortunately, this relaxation is not always guaranteed.

Fortunately, we're not just talking about overtime. Monsoon told me that long vacations were the rare time he and his friends could find time together, so they finally got to play Beast Party together: "Although I worked overtime, the task didn't become a very slow thing, but I still made time to play games. I was very happy. "Looking through the circle of friends, familiar developers and publishers also released their own life during the holidays: nine pictures of rare meals cooked at home, travel photos taken as travel, crazy forwarding of their favorite Asian Games players and teams...

Beast Party is controversial for a variety of reasons, but it still brings a lot of joy to Monsoon and friends. Perhaps it is these little pleasures that finally become the true value of the still busy holiday. Unfortunately, such opportunities were not many. All practitioners can do right now may be to hope that they will have a truly undistracted, completely relaxed vacation in the near future.

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