Creating games is not easy; sometimes, you have to work under high pressure and to the point of exhaustion.
Recently, a former Rockstar environment artist shared his memories of working on Bully in a conversation with Retro Gamer. Creating the "school GTA" became a serious challenge for the team.
Andrew Wood said that there were serious crunches (overtime; this is generally typical for the studio's games). For him, memories of work are a mixture of love and hate:
"It was a fun, weird, hellish, chaotic, amazing time. I fondly remember the people, those times, and the crazy things we did after work, but then I think about the stress."
There were "constant internal conflicts in the team due to the constant stress from work" — several developers even had nervous breakdowns, but Andrew held on:
"It was difficult to work in such an environment, but I knew that Bully was worth it, so I endured."
At the end of Bully's development, we had to work "seven days a week, an average of 18 hours a day," which exhausted people. This led to a high turnover rate, but he decided to stay because he knew the project "would be special."
