The shortest amount of downtime between projects I had was two weeks. We shipped the game, I took my comp time, and I came back and started on a new project. We weren't going at full speed yet - it was mostly just exploratory preproduction work for the new game - but it was still work. The longest amount of downtime was indefinite. The project finished, didn't sell well, and almost everybody got laid off as a result.

Normally what happens is that we get off-the-books comp time, usually some factor of how much time we crunched before launch, and then we come back for a few weeks/months of taking it easy, doing retrospectives, and brainstorming new ideas for what we want to do next, and then ramping back to a normal work week after that.

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