Weekly meetings? Daily meetings are great! And in our 10 man team, they only take about 12-20 minutes. Making this daily also makes it easier to understand you can't always have a perfect update to give.
this requires a lot of discipline. daily meetings can become bigger than it should and be really distracting. also, I'd find hard to put 10 people online at the same time, everyday. If you manage to do that well, congratulations, it's not easy.
This is what we call the 'standup'. Each person should limit the scope of their discussion during this meeting, so it doesn't block everyone. After, they can chatter as much as they wish, but prioritizing the important chunks first is just good professional courtesy.
Edmo Freitas Our team has members in The United States, Europe and the Middle East, so the meetings are at the end of my day and the start of the day for others. Works fine. And ***** is completely right about the required brevity.
when I was working a few years back on an MMO, we sometimes had a lot of very interesting ideas on how to make the whole thing function. since Out base was in america, most of our forum moderators/admins were in the uk or canada, our lead artist was on one coast, the other on the other, our lead coder in australia, and pretty much everyone else peppered all around, things could get a bit hectic trying to keep track of times. We didn't want to have people having to get up at 3 am in the morning to go say "yeah it's almost done" so we started having more or less "mini meetings" on times that were optimal to the most amount of people, for easy check in from the boss, to having an ease of access for the head coder to talk to those below him. It worked out fairly well. We found having meetings on a bit of a "you can come if you're awake" basis, but having one definite meeting you were suppoused to try to make per week, worked out very well. It also meant a lot of the newer employees felt more..well I guess motivated? They could show how things were progressing, and get help from some of the leads on a day to day basis.
Not only that, but know when you've failed to communicate. I've been on projects where we discussed something, but actually failed to commit to a really clear decision.
I don't have much experience, but I am developing a game right now with two other guys across the country and I'd say the most important thing is to do a very small / quick to develop game or game jam before you commit to a larger project. You'll find out how effectively you communicate and share assets with each other before you start a full project and finding out if someone isn't very effective at working remotely before you're halfway through a big project is a lot easier in the long run, though thankfully both my team mates are very reliable.
I just want to say, as a long time viewer of this stuff, the guest animators have all done an amazing job at capturing the overall feel of the visual styles of these videos while also adding a fun, new take of their own on the style. They are accessibly the same, and charmingly novel. Great job, guest animators!
Cameron Brown Well it is accurate in this case. As much as I'd love if it were to actually become a game, I seriously doubt it will. There is no monetary gain being talked about what so ever, and the only real reason I can think of for doing this other than for fun would be bragging rights. I don't think I see your point.
We're working on a MOBA like league of legends. The interesting thing is that there is a second gamemode where you play through a dungeon. I actually don't know everything since when I said I barely started working, I mean I just started yesterday. Communication isn't very good yet, so that's why this video was helpful.
Cameron Brown It's common and i had the experience myself. The headhunter didn't need a resume of mine, when he called the companies he just gave them the link to my github profile.
This is not exclusive to Game Development. I work on a webcomic series and everything here lines up there as well. My boss is in Scotland, one of the artists is in Australia, Me and another artist are in the western U.S. Our head writer is in Eastern U.S. And I can't recall where our other writer is. I joined back I November. And it turns out our webcomic had a falling out with the head site and so they were in the middle of rearranging management. The last time we checked in on the status of the projects was March. So now I'm here, the newest artist who doesn't even exist yet to our readers having to pull everyone together after 5 months of silence to get things back on track before our hiatus breeches the 1 year mark. So keeping contact, even if it isn't work related is key. Because then it'll prevent falling out of schedule and push things back. Speaking of which I'm going to pull up our group chat now to try another go and getting things in line.
Okay... well since a lot of people are super interested on what I work on here it is: It is a very niche side of the internet and I will admit right out that it's based in My Little Pony. ask-fob-twinkle.tumblr.com/
I can relate ALOT with this. I'm a videogames localization PM, and I totally agree: having your team on Skype or sharing Dropbox folders with the rest of the members from around the world has proven to be ESSENTIAL.
Yeah, even when you're not working remotely and still meet face to face, if you're not constantly catching up on what everyone is doing things happen like multiple people working on the same thing without realising it. It's also why its a good idea to use some sort of methodoligy like scrum to keep all the features in check and assigned.
I had a TH-cam group of people just making videos for fun and when our communication broke for a month due to one person having faimly issues the group never got back together. and we were basically just guys doing projects for fun and who liked hanging out.
Great video. I do project management consulting for software companies (some of them game studios) and see these issues regularly when working with a new client. Setting clear expectations in form of a workflow (agile or traditional) and establishing communication channels is key. This goes for any team, but in a distributed environment it's more visible because you can't just head over to someone's desk and ask them a question. To collaborate well, all team members need to know what they can expect from the others, and what others expect from them. A clear structure as described in the video, with who to report to, what to deliver and what deadlines to keep is important. To keep everyone on track and involved, I would go beyond the weekly meeting recommendation from the video. In my opinion, a brief daily update call (you can timebox to 15 minutes) is important to keep everyone in the loop and identify blocking issues early. This update is an opportunity for team members in different locations to ask for help or input from others, which they can schedule as a separate follow-up call.
I'm one of those ppl that prefers remote, works my own hours, stays up till 3am. Communication is key for our remote dev team. Trello, slack, and pull requests keep us moving forward.
actually no, our main project is generally made by 1 person, I write the story and character design so we never had to use GIT or anything before. It was only when I was programming a game with someone else is when we learned about it. When we go onto new projects we will be fully using GIT from now on.
> over two decades Version control in general? definitely yes. git specifically? No, back in 2010 you still saw companies and labs using SVN, Bazaar, and mercurial. Fog Creek Software (whose founder has an awesome blog if you want to read more about how to lead a software development team www.joelonsoftware.com/) was still building tools on top of mercurial. Many larger companies still use Perforce because it is made to handle larger codebases.
I've never even considered my career could start as a remote employee, physical limitatiions always drained my will to follow the gamedev path, thank you EC!
Not making games, but I work as a programer with several people from different countries, and we use Scrum. Basically we have daily 15 minutes meetings where everybody says in a few words what they did yesterday and what they will do tomorrow, and if they have any problems that need help or any obstacles that can affect their task, if so we then indicate with is the best member of the team to help or the best solution to solve those obstacles. Every week we have an 1 hour meeting where we take a look at the task not done and assign difficulty degrees so we can better create realistic deadlines. And every 2 weeks we review all task made in those 2 weeks, select the task for the next 2 weeks, and review what went well, not well and where we can improve
I work on a minecraft server with people from Norway, England, the Middle East, all over. I sent in an email to you guys on this very subject, and it's so awesome to hear back this way. Gave me a lot to think about for our next team meeting. Thanks!
the part about giving them a PC or phone bills is so true. when I signed up for online school and they sent me a pc, and paid my,internet on top of it, it sent a message of "we care about your success". and it deffinetly had me working harder and closer with the school.
as a remote worker thats been remote working for 2 years youve hit the nail on some of these points! Really great summation. Also some companies have to have some 'trust' towards their employees
As someone working in the IT of a pretty big company with collegues all around the globe, this is a fantastic topic that is growing quickly at the moment. The tech is ready for almost everyone to work remotely today, living wherever he wants to live on the planet (or even off the planet, looking at the ISS for example). But how do you organise that?! Project management is way behind the technical possibilities and maybe even behind what the individual people could do.
Stopping at 2;32, I must mention how so-far this reminds me of my week-long out-of-school suspension: Keeping to my daily schedule, I would rise & eat breakfast at the usual time, I would tune-in my stereo--set at a low volume--to my school's FM-station and begin working at my bedroom desk upon my assignments, working upon them within the same scheduled order & time limits of each class-period accordingly. I would do the same for my lunch, and spend time doing yard-work during what was my scheduled gym-class period. When my teacher came to drop-off & pick-up my work, she was amazed at how far ahead of time it was completed compared to that of the rest of the class! Only the two book reports actually dragged me down, as writing upon 4"x6" cards about each chapter read--within the guidelines requested for each chapter--took some time. When I stated upon the second book, I didn't even bother doing any after getting so far into that 200+ page monster! So what did I learn? I work best alone, unless placed with someone with a like mind... like my brother's friend, Tim. I CAN keep to a structure, and as I work--as I latter learned in career-center auto-body class--I am my own disciplinarian... And my hardest one at-that!
In our company we have more remote people than in office. Best practice for me is short standup between all devs(local+remote) where each tells what he has been working on yesterday and what is is goals today. for company around 30 people we make it in 20-25 minutes every day. This is important for me to feed as part of company and be more motivated. There is no room to hide and you structure your thoughts and your work in that time. Totally suggest < 30 mins meetings every day. Even though we work in different timezones. It is end of the working day for me but beginning of the day for office and people in different timezones
I worked that way once. In a final project for a class. It was a 2d animated short made in group so we would meet and talk about what and how we were going to do things, but must of the work was done in our houses. I was the one in charge of putting everything together among other things.The bad thing tho is that some people didn't respect the deadlines. So I end up editing and rendering the same morning of the day we needed to turn in the short. Literally we were rendering the thing and the class had already started. We did manage to turn in the final project. moral of the story, respect the deadlines.
It is interesting to see how much of this advice is applicable to other kinds of design. I work in buildings engineering in a small office and we usually have to work with many different discipline in different offices often from different provinces. The main takeaway is that communication is very important. Talk, email, chat frequently.
I am currently in the process of choosing my subjects for year 9 and I always want to do something arty or sciency but I have always wanted to be able to help develop video games. I live in Australia and it has always been a worry of mine to be able to work remotely but this has really helped me.
I think, above all other things, this video proved that there's high demand for a video about console remotes XD Also, loving this guest art :) good job!
I did a small amount of volunteer artwork for an old MMO on the other side of the world from me. It had a very close atmosphere like this. We used an SVN and had a cheery chat in skype as well as a billboard we could select project cards to do through it.
The first remote project I worked on was all right. A four person remote team. We used google docs and discord in tandem to write our Analysis and Design Documents together (small team :. everyone writes the initial documentation). Email and Skype for communicating with stakeholders. From their the one major problem we had was scope creep - the GUI ended up changing 3 times and we had to add a couple minor features into a back log of two future sprints. Unless we were discussing something major we used Facebook groups and split up our conversations into 3 chats (Development, Design and General). We ended up running a little over time wise but we had enough slack time built in to the schedule to cover the time over run.
This is really important not just in game development but any sort of tech field. I think the most important thing that they can discussing was that has to be a way to both trust and verify that your employees are disciplined enough to work remotely
Honestly this isn't just a vid on good practise for the Game and other creative industry, this could be the good practise needed by so many digital commuters
Such good tips! I've been doing remote 3d freelance work since I was 17. It's funny how most clients don't know about this, so I usually turn into a director setting up communication/deadlines and rules. This all all super important stuff!
I worked for more of a year developing games with people I only met in real life twice. It was a really great time and I worked in almost 5 games, however working from home means working more than you can imagine, specially in crunch time.
Could you guys make an episode about tabletop rpg design some time? I feel like it's a pretty different design space that not a lot of people understand. ( and I may or may not be part of a fledgeling tabletop rpg studio)
"It's important to be clear and specific about those expectations." This applies whether it's a remote team or not. Remote teams make this need more obvious, but if you've ever worked in a brick&mortar one-location office job with crappy communication and poorly-explained (or nonexistent) expectations, you've seen how relying on everybody sharing time and space is a poor substitute for actual management skills. "It's easy to fall out of the normal flow of an office." That's because the normal flow of an office is an illusion. It doesn't really exist. If you are relying on it to substitute for actual management skills, you'll fail.
Huh, that's funny. I just wrote my master's thesis in psychology on precisely the subject of virtual teams. More specifically, the relationship between shared leadership, cmc self-efficacy and team member creativity in virtual teams. It's very nice to know that companies around the world are aware that they need to consider alternative ways of managing and supporting these kinds of teams instead of just using the same structures they always have.
Physical location is not a barrier to electronic work. It is one of the greatest advantage that the internet has given to a great many industries. Considering location removes a vast VAST majority of possible applicants for absolutely no reason. If you want to hire the best you can get, you must get rid of the idea that being on site matters.
People who need oversight in todays world are far less marketable no matter how good they are at their job. It's nothing personal it's just the way progress works. There was a time when employees who could memorize a lot were highly valued and that's not true today either.
Another "Why" that can be interesting is that worldwide distributed teams can work on a project around the clock. Since a lot of the work is linear in nature, having for example a modeler create assets during the "day" then the surfacer texture them remotely from the other side of the world during the "night" cut the time required to have those in half. That also work really well when testing with new feedback for the dev released at the end of the previous day readily available at the start of the next one. There is obviously one big caveat: you need super tight communication with the remote members because they won't be able to clarify any doubt until the lead is at work, potentially wasting a day's worth of work.
This video should be watched by more CEOs these days. My 3 of my last 5 workplaces basically went against any good advice displayed here. And then they scratch their heads why "employee fluctuation" is too high. Goes along with the "human incentives": idea -> pay ppl more to stay, which turns just out to be counter-productive. Most employees being cut-off from the work community just use the increased paycheck offer to drive up bargains on the job search. Often, employer that experience high employee fluctuations just don' really catch what the actual problem is ...
I work remotely as a Database Administrator, so in tech but not game development. This is 100% on point and well said (for a company perspective). Could you possibly do another video covering remote work as a remote worker? I've gotten to the point where I'm proud of my work as a remote worker, but it came from some serious work on my end as well as good work on my companies end (which you covered in this video). I think it might be cool to cover what it's like to be a remote worker, separated by timezones, thousands of miles, and sometimes even language barriers. Just some of my thoughts :)
Quick question: have any of you ever had the chance to work with/as Game Designers on remote? It seems a difficult job to do this way because of the communication needs.
I'm in a group of about 40 - 60 volunteers (being volunteers, the count of who is actually active varies) and we are all over the place making a game. I was quite interested to find a video related to it. I can relate to most of the points brought up.
Clear line of reporting is vital. I've left jobs because there wasn't one (the job in question I was 3 months out of training without ever even meeting my direct superior or knowing who they were.)
Not that I do game development, but I do do work on projects that often help (especially now that I live in China) is not available locals and means I have to search abroad for the help. For that, even the main topic of this video was more aimed towards Game Dev, it was still helpful to me (although the title and thumbnail felt slightly misleading as I thought it was literally about the development of remote controls - maybe I'm just a bit stupid)
A software engineering guide to moderately accurate time investment estimates: Step 1: Your first estimate is your gut feeling. Minor bugfix? Give me two hours. Step 2: Double the number. Make it four hours. Step 3: up the scale one order of magnitude. Make it four workdays. Step 4: Present estimate. Boss yells at you. This should only take a few hours. Step 5: GOTO Step 1 But in all honesty: The double-and-upscale estimate has proven itself to be more accurate than most working in IT would like to admit. It does not beat current agile estimation systems like e.g. velocity analysis (not by any stretch of the imagination!), but if you need a quick and dirty number to throw at someones head, this beats "uh, dunno" by a country mile.
If possible, bring the remote workers over to your office or travel to them and work together for like a week or two. At a previous job we tested this with two offshore teams, one was brought onsite for a month and the other we worked with purely remotely. The onsite team's performance was far better. Later we swapped around and the performance picked up for the previous remote team. Moreover after having worked with someone together physically, worked remotely afterwards just works better. The effect is more than simply reduced siloing. Yes, when the first remote team went back to be a remote team again, the performance was far better than original. Personally I know I work and communicate better after having worked with them on the same location.
I kinda miss the videos talking about game design as opposed to the process of game development. But I still enjoyed this. Something I've been wanting you guys to do is a video on how to do character creation right. Every character creator I've seen has ended up sucking in one way or another.
Remote teams are huge in web development right now. A simple search on Stack Overflow for a Ruby on Rails job will bring up a number of companies that are 100% remote with no actual office location.
Yup and it is considered one of the best VNs out there in terms of depth. It really says a lot when freaking 4chan of all things can make something so good when major developers screw up all the time due to mismanagement of the work.
tygonmaster and they did all that remotely. I don't think any of them actually met up IRL when developing. What I know is that they did a good enough job to make 4chan cry, even for a little bit.
I was just about to mention this. what they managed to the with a team from all around the world is truly incredible. sure it took several years but in the end it was well worth it.
Maybe also make a video covering what you as an employee can do to make sure that you're not only as productive as someone in the office, but also that the management and other team members know it. Working from home is difficult. Not so much because the work is different or the fact that there are more distractions (though the latter one is certainly true), but because many people still feel most comfortable being around people, rather than just talking to a screen all day.
LoL Half the people thought this was about remotes and not Workers on Remote locations xD Oh, I love the young, who have no idea of the world of Design and Development. They are so pure :3
great video guys. this actually applies to all kinds of remote work, I'm in the architecture field in a remote office and this felt very similar to what you described. although we might use different terminology for our work from game developers it sounds very similar to my life at the moment!
I absolutely, 100% thought this episode was going to be about the design of remote controls by the title and thumbnail. I'm not sure how EC would tie that into game development, but I think if anyone could it would be them.
Otem's Defiance team, HyperBerry Games, is a 6 person team, all of us are Venezuelans but 3 are in Spain and the other 3 (including me) are in Venezuela. We managed to coordinate and work alongside nicely using a loot of tools like GitHub, SourceTree, Skype, Google Hangouts and Whats App. We had to overcome the time difference and the problems Venezuela is going trough like the energy emergency which means I had a black out of 2 to 4 hours every day... But we managed to deliver a full game (our first game) in a year and a half :)
Been working as a web designer for a small firm at home, man, this video would have been so useful to see and maybe show them as well. I was easily tempted by the idea of working from home, but then the workload starting only piling up with no one to rely too, because they were too busy. Constant calls, of seeing how work is going was also a nuisance, at the same time giving me more to do. (make these applications for these firms and also manage these websites when you can, the owners need a change chop chop). Felt like a nightmare so i decided to quit, seeing this made me rethink things though.
>From the company's side, it helps to pitch in to cover necessary expenses, such as PC upgrades or internet bills, that allow remote team members to keep working efficiently and show that their work is valued. Uhhh... there is a problem from both parties if they aren't covering your internet.
From the title and picture I thought this was an episode of how remotes gets developed. I wasn't expecting this at all!? Where's my remote development episode xp!
I disagree, they may not be analysis videos but they still talk about design and execution. It's always neat to hear what Dan or James have to say about games themselves instead of using them as examples to deliver a point.
One of the most overlooked things you can buy your remote (and in-office) workers: HEADPHONES WITH MICS. This killed me when I was 100% remote. People would use their onboard mic, and it was TERRIBLE. I couldn't hear them, we got endless echoes, and office sounds would take over the conversation. Remote people wouldn't buy the ones that worked best for the office because they already had their own headphones and were loathe to buy ones JUST for work. Also, in meetings, have a good speakerphone for the remote people. You don't even need one of those crazy set-ups that large offices have. Logitech makes a few that are USB and work great.
I literally just got hired on to a remote team. I really didnt want to be remote but here I am. It sucks. I have no idea what anyone could possibly do to make it better. everyone has been so nice and friendly and has helpful as possible but I just cant shake the feeling that Im all alone. I am on the other side of the country all by myself while everyone else is all by them selves on the other corners of the country. Im scared to start this job by itself, never mind being all alone.
I really needed this. I think a lot of this stuff could be reflected on to outsourced animation work as well. Which makes me feel better about the shitshows I've been hired by.
Look where we are now.
I hate this still applies 11 months later
Me four years ago: this video will never be relevant in my life
Me now in quarantine: everyone should be watching this
Hey, this episode is very very very relevant now.
So true.
Ye
yeet
well this is relevant again
Weekly meetings? Daily meetings are great! And in our 10 man team, they only take about 12-20 minutes. Making this daily also makes it easier to understand you can't always have a perfect update to give.
this requires a lot of discipline. daily meetings can become bigger than it should and be really distracting. also, I'd find hard to put 10 people online at the same time, everyday. If you manage to do that well, congratulations, it's not easy.
This is what we call the 'standup'. Each person should limit the scope of their discussion during this meeting, so it doesn't block everyone. After, they can chatter as much as they wish, but prioritizing the important chunks first is just good professional courtesy.
Edmo Freitas Our team has members in The United States, Europe and the Middle East, so the meetings are at the end of my day and the start of the day for others. Works fine. And ***** is completely right about the required brevity.
when I was working a few years back on an MMO, we sometimes had a lot of very interesting ideas on how to make the whole thing function. since Out base was in america, most of our forum moderators/admins were in the uk or canada, our lead artist was on one coast, the other on the other, our lead coder in australia, and pretty much everyone else peppered all around, things could get a bit hectic trying to keep track of times. We didn't want to have people having to get up at 3 am in the morning to go say "yeah it's almost done" so we started having more or less "mini meetings" on times that were optimal to the most amount of people, for easy check in from the boss, to having an ease of access for the head coder to talk to those below him. It worked out fairly well. We found having meetings on a bit of a "you can come if you're awake" basis, but having one definite meeting you were suppoused to try to make per week, worked out very well. It also meant a lot of the newer employees felt more..well I guess motivated? They could show how things were progressing, and get help from some of the leads on a day to day basis.
What was the MMO that you were working on?
Boy, if he only knew how important this information would be come 2020....
What i take from this video:
1) Discuss deadline
2) Discuss everything else
I may have missed a few points.
Communicate with your team often is pretty much the golden rule.
i'd argue teamwork should be common sense, but then i realized we lack so much discipline that exercises in that should be required.
Not only that, but know when you've failed to communicate. I've been on projects where we discussed something, but actually failed to commit to a really clear decision.
I don't have much experience, but I am developing a game right now with two other guys across the country and I'd say the most important thing is to do a very small / quick to develop game or game jam before you commit to a larger project. You'll find out how effectively you communicate and share assets with each other before you start a full project and finding out if someone isn't very effective at working remotely before you're halfway through a big project is a lot easier in the long run, though thankfully both my team mates are very reliable.
I just want to say, as a long time viewer of this stuff, the guest animators have all done an amazing job at capturing the overall feel of the visual styles of these videos while also adding a fun, new take of their own on the style. They are accessibly the same, and charmingly novel. Great job, guest animators!
This video is more relevant than ever.
So true.
This is perfectly timed. I just started working with a team designing a game (for fun but still) for the first time.
Cameron Brown Well it is accurate in this case. As much as I'd love if it were to actually become a game, I seriously doubt it will. There is no monetary gain being talked about what so ever, and the only real reason I can think of for doing this other than for fun would be bragging rights.
I don't think I see your point.
I don't see the point either, working "for fun" is gaining experience as well, and learning new stuff is fun. So keep it going :)
We're working on a MOBA like league of legends. The interesting thing is that there is a second gamemode where you play through a dungeon. I actually don't know everything since when I said I barely started working, I mean I just started yesterday. Communication isn't very good yet, so that's why this video was helpful.
Ethan Buchanan If you want to get hired as a programmer, I would recommend getting some work done on github. Best possible reference you'll ever get.
Cameron Brown It's common and i had the experience myself. The headhunter didn't need a resume of mine, when he called the companies he just gave them the link to my github profile.
This is not exclusive to Game Development.
I work on a webcomic series and everything here lines up there as well.
My boss is in Scotland, one of the artists is in Australia, Me and another artist are in the western U.S. Our head writer is in Eastern U.S. And I can't recall where our other writer is.
I joined back I November. And it turns out our webcomic had a falling out with the head site and so they were in the middle of rearranging management. The last time we checked in on the status of the projects was March. So now I'm here, the newest artist who doesn't even exist yet to our readers having to pull everyone together after 5 months of silence to get things back on track before our hiatus breeches the 1 year mark.
So keeping contact, even if it isn't work related is key. Because then it'll prevent falling out of schedule and push things back.
Speaking of which I'm going to pull up our group chat now to try another go and getting things in line.
I'd like to know what webcomic that is as well.
I want to know too!
Your head writer is where...? Also, which webcomic?
I also want to know what your webcomic is. (Also any you would like to recommend.)
Okay... well since a lot of people are super interested on what I work on here it is:
It is a very niche side of the internet and I will admit right out that it's based in My Little Pony.
ask-fob-twinkle.tumblr.com/
I can relate ALOT with this. I'm a videogames localization PM, and I totally agree: having your team on Skype or sharing Dropbox folders with the rest of the members from around the world has proven to be ESSENTIAL.
Geez, what a relevant video for current year
So true.
That feedback loop isn't just valuable; it's essential. I've had two groups fall apart because of not having it.
Yeah, even when you're not working remotely and still meet face to face, if you're not constantly catching up on what everyone is doing things happen like multiple people working on the same thing without realising it.
It's also why its a good idea to use some sort of methodoligy like scrum to keep all the features in check and assigned.
I had a TH-cam group of people just making videos for fun and when our communication broke for a month due to one person having faimly issues the group never got back together.
and we were basically just guys doing projects for fun and who liked hanging out.
Great video. I do project management consulting for software companies (some of them game studios) and see these issues regularly when working with a new client.
Setting clear expectations in form of a workflow (agile or traditional) and establishing communication channels is key. This goes for any team, but in a distributed environment it's more visible because you can't just head over to someone's desk and ask them a question.
To collaborate well, all team members need to know what they can expect from the others, and what others expect from them. A clear structure as described in the video, with who to report to, what to deliver and what deadlines to keep is important.
To keep everyone on track and involved, I would go beyond the weekly meeting recommendation from the video. In my opinion, a brief daily update call (you can timebox to 15 minutes) is important to keep everyone in the loop and identify blocking issues early. This update is an opportunity for team members in different locations to ask for help or input from others, which they can schedule as a separate follow-up call.
I'm one of those ppl that prefers remote, works my own hours, stays up till 3am. Communication is key for our remote dev team. Trello, slack, and pull requests keep us moving forward.
I had a programmer i hired that ended up teaching me how to use Git, and that was super useful.
How did you ever survive working in technology without it? It's been the standard method for coordinating software work for over two decades
It possible they used a different version control software before learning git.
They probably used TFS. I weep for their souls.
actually no, our main project is generally made by 1 person, I write the story and character design so we never had to use GIT or anything before. It was only when I was programming a game with someone else is when we learned about it. When we go onto new projects we will be fully using GIT from now on.
> over two decades
Version control in general? definitely yes.
git specifically? No, back in 2010 you still saw companies and labs using SVN, Bazaar, and mercurial. Fog Creek Software (whose founder has an awesome blog if you want to read more about how to lead a software development team www.joelonsoftware.com/) was still building tools on top of mercurial. Many larger companies still use Perforce because it is made to handle larger codebases.
I've never even considered my career could start as a remote employee, physical limitatiions always drained my will to follow the gamedev path, thank you EC!
How do you go about making a game if all of the members of your team live in different parts of the world?
FILE: LOGIC DELETED.
Duh, the Internet!
Good leadership, skype, weekly deadlines, one person who's main job is to connect everyone's work and trust.
Wtf
Not making games, but I work as a programer with several people from different countries, and we use Scrum. Basically we have daily 15 minutes meetings where everybody says in a few words what they did yesterday and what they will do tomorrow, and if they have any problems that need help or any obstacles that can affect their task, if so we then indicate with is the best member of the team to help or the best solution to solve those obstacles. Every week we have an 1 hour meeting where we take a look at the task not done and assign difficulty degrees so we can better create realistic deadlines. And every 2 weeks we review all task made in those 2 weeks, select the task for the next 2 weeks, and review what went well, not well and where we can improve
I work on a minecraft server with people from Norway, England, the Middle East, all over. I sent in an email to you guys on this very subject, and it's so awesome to hear back this way. Gave me a lot to think about for our next team meeting. Thanks!
I am convinced EC went back in time to post this in 2016
Awh man here I was looking forward to a history lesson about remote controls..
the part about giving them a PC or phone bills is so true. when I signed up for online school and they sent me a pc, and paid my,internet on top of it, it sent a message of "we care about your success". and it deffinetly had me working harder and closer with the school.
as a remote worker thats been remote working for 2 years youve hit the nail on some of these points! Really great summation.
Also some companies have to have some 'trust' towards their employees
I feel like I'm not the only one who randomly clicked on the video thinking it was about the actual development of console and tv remotes over time
Without reading the whole title of course
Believe me, you're not the only one.
yeah pretty much, but this is way more usefull.
your not
I thought it was even with the full title, I mean, for some reason, I feel like a controller when I read it...
I think the animator might have been playing a little much overwatch.
who isn't?
excuse me sir, but you made a grammatical error when you said "too much" and "overwatch" in the same sentence, maybe fix that
+Harrison W xD
the writers too apparently
+Harrison W I get it.
Animation was ON POINT this episode! Very creative and well drawn :D
As someone working in the IT of a pretty big company with collegues all around the globe, this is a fantastic topic that is growing quickly at the moment.
The tech is ready for almost everyone to work remotely today, living wherever he wants to live on the planet (or even off the planet, looking at the ISS for example).
But how do you organise that?! Project management is way behind the technical possibilities and maybe even behind what the individual people could do.
Ya boi needs this in 2020
I cannot accurately define my love for this channel with real English words.
Stopping at 2;32, I must mention how so-far this reminds me of my week-long out-of-school suspension:
Keeping to my daily schedule, I would rise & eat breakfast at the usual time, I would tune-in my stereo--set at a low volume--to my school's FM-station and begin working at my bedroom desk upon my assignments, working upon them within the same scheduled order & time limits of each class-period accordingly. I would do the same for my lunch, and spend time doing yard-work during what was my scheduled gym-class period.
When my teacher came to drop-off & pick-up my work, she was amazed at how far ahead of time it was completed compared to that of the rest of the class! Only the two book reports actually dragged me down, as writing upon 4"x6" cards about each chapter read--within the guidelines requested for each chapter--took some time. When I stated upon the second book, I didn't even bother doing any after getting so far into that 200+ page monster!
So what did I learn? I work best alone, unless placed with someone with a like mind... like my brother's friend, Tim. I CAN keep to a structure, and as I work--as I latter learned in career-center auto-body class--I am my own disciplinarian... And my hardest one at-that!
In our company we have more remote people than in office. Best practice for me is short standup between all devs(local+remote) where each tells what he has been working on yesterday and what is is goals today. for company around 30 people we make it in 20-25 minutes every day. This is important for me to feed as part of company and be more motivated. There is no room to hide and you structure your thoughts and your work in that time.
Totally suggest < 30 mins meetings every day.
Even though we work in different timezones. It is end of the working day for me but beginning of the day for office and people in different timezones
I worked that way once. In a final project for a class. It was a 2d animated short made in group so we would meet and talk about what and how we were going to do things, but must of the work was done in our houses. I was the one in charge of putting everything together among other things.The bad thing tho is that some people didn't respect the deadlines. So I end up editing and rendering the same morning of the day we needed to turn in the short. Literally we were rendering the thing and the class had already started. We did manage to turn in the final project.
moral of the story, respect the deadlines.
It is interesting to see how much of this advice is applicable to other kinds of design. I work in buildings engineering in a small office and we usually have to work with many different discipline in different offices often from different provinces. The main takeaway is that communication is very important. Talk, email, chat frequently.
5:48 that discord light mode is sacreligious
I am currently in the process of choosing my subjects for year 9 and I always want to do something arty or sciency but I have always wanted to be able to help develop video games. I live in Australia and it has always been a worry of mine to be able to work remotely but this has really helped me.
I think, above all other things, this video proved that there's high demand for a video about console remotes XD
Also, loving this guest art :) good job!
This seems to apply a lot this year too
I did a small amount of volunteer artwork for an old MMO on the other side of the world from me. It had a very close atmosphere like this. We used an SVN and had a cheery chat in skype as well as a billboard we could select project cards to do through it.
The first remote project I worked on was all right.
A four person remote team. We used google docs and discord in tandem to write our Analysis and Design Documents together (small team :. everyone writes the initial documentation). Email and Skype for communicating with stakeholders. From their the one major problem we had was scope creep - the GUI ended up changing 3 times and we had to add a couple minor features into a back log of two future sprints. Unless we were discussing something major we used Facebook groups and split up our conversations into 3 chats (Development, Design and General). We ended up running a little over time wise but we had enough slack time built in to the schedule to cover the time over run.
This is really important not just in game development but any sort of tech field. I think the most important thing that they can discussing was that has to be a way to both trust and verify that your employees are disciplined enough to work remotely
Honestly this isn't just a vid on good practise for the Game and other creative industry, this could be the good practise needed by so many digital commuters
I smiled at the 'up tick" picture way more than I should have.
Such good tips! I've been doing remote 3d freelance work since I was 17. It's funny how most clients don't know about this, so I usually turn into a director setting up communication/deadlines and rules. This all all super important stuff!
I worked for more of a year developing games with people I only met in real life twice. It was a really great time and I worked in almost 5 games, however working from home means working more than you can imagine, specially in crunch time.
Could you guys make an episode about tabletop rpg design some time? I feel like it's a pretty different design space that not a lot of people understand.
( and I may or may not be part of a fledgeling tabletop rpg studio)
"It's important to be clear and specific about those expectations."
This applies whether it's a remote team or not. Remote teams make this need more obvious, but if you've ever worked in a brick&mortar one-location office job with crappy communication and poorly-explained (or nonexistent) expectations, you've seen how relying on everybody sharing time and space is a poor substitute for actual management skills.
"It's easy to fall out of the normal flow of an office."
That's because the normal flow of an office is an illusion. It doesn't really exist. If you are relying on it to substitute for actual management skills, you'll fail.
Oh my gosh, this is so relevant to Graduate School! I wish my group took advice like this.
Huh, that's funny. I just wrote my master's thesis in psychology on precisely the subject of virtual teams. More specifically, the relationship between shared leadership, cmc self-efficacy and team member creativity in virtual teams. It's very nice to know that companies around the world are aware that they need to consider alternative ways of managing and supporting these kinds of teams instead of just using the same structures they always have.
Its almost weird how relevant this is now, 5 years later...
I feel that a lot of this can be applied to better managing any workers, not just remote ones.
Hey guys I came here from 2020. Got any toilet paper?
I’m not that rich,.
Physical location is not a barrier to electronic work. It is one of the greatest advantage that the internet has given to a great many industries. Considering location removes a vast VAST majority of possible applicants for absolutely no reason. If you want to hire the best you can get, you must get rid of the idea that being on site matters.
People who need oversight in todays world are far less marketable no matter how good they are at their job. It's nothing personal it's just the way progress works. There was a time when employees who could memorize a lot were highly valued and that's not true today either.
This is more relevant than ever
I think this has taught me a lot on just team management as a whole more than anything else thank you
Another "Why" that can be interesting is that worldwide distributed teams can work on a project around the clock.
Since a lot of the work is linear in nature, having for example a modeler create assets during the "day" then the surfacer texture them remotely from the other side of the world during the "night" cut the time required to have those in half.
That also work really well when testing with new feedback for the dev released at the end of the previous day readily available at the start of the next one.
There is obviously one big caveat: you need super tight communication with the remote members because they won't be able to clarify any doubt until the lead is at work, potentially wasting a day's worth of work.
This video should be watched by more CEOs these days. My 3 of my last 5 workplaces basically went against any good advice displayed here. And then they scratch their heads why "employee fluctuation" is too high. Goes along with the "human incentives": idea -> pay ppl more to stay, which turns just out to be counter-productive. Most employees being cut-off from the work community just use the increased paycheck offer to drive up bargains on the job search. Often, employer that experience high employee fluctuations just don' really catch what the actual problem is ...
Probably also worth reading up on the Ori and the Blind Forest team. They don't even have a central headquarters. Entirely remote production.
I thought this episode was going to be about remotes.... :(
I FELT SO DISSAPOINTED.
Me too
It turned out to be a different kind of Harmony™.
me 2
same
I work remotely as a Database Administrator, so in tech but not game development. This is 100% on point and well said (for a company perspective).
Could you possibly do another video covering remote work as a remote worker? I've gotten to the point where I'm proud of my work as a remote worker, but it came from some serious work on my end as well as good work on my companies end (which you covered in this video). I think it might be cool to cover what it's like to be a remote worker, separated by timezones, thousands of miles, and sometimes even language barriers.
Just some of my thoughts :)
Quick question: have any of you ever had the chance to work with/as Game Designers on remote? It seems a difficult job to do this way because of the communication needs.
I'm in a group of about 40 - 60 volunteers (being volunteers, the count of who is actually active varies) and we are all over the place making a game. I was quite interested to find a video related to it. I can relate to most of the points brought up.
Clear line of reporting is vital. I've left jobs because there wasn't one (the job in question I was 3 months out of training without ever even meeting my direct superior or knowing who they were.)
I have been waiting for this video since I started watching Extra Credits
This artist is awesome! Please collaborate with him more often
Not that I do game development, but I do do work on projects that often help (especially now that I live in China) is not available locals and means I have to search abroad for the help. For that, even the main topic of this video was more aimed towards Game Dev, it was still helpful to me (although the title and thumbnail felt slightly misleading as I thought it was literally about the development of remote controls - maybe I'm just a bit stupid)
A software engineering guide to moderately accurate time investment estimates:
Step 1: Your first estimate is your gut feeling. Minor bugfix? Give me two hours.
Step 2: Double the number. Make it four hours.
Step 3: up the scale one order of magnitude. Make it four workdays.
Step 4: Present estimate. Boss yells at you. This should only take a few hours.
Step 5: GOTO Step 1
But in all honesty: The double-and-upscale estimate has proven itself to be more accurate than most working in IT would like to admit. It does not beat current agile estimation systems like e.g. velocity analysis (not by any stretch of the imagination!), but if you need a quick and dirty number to throw at someones head, this beats "uh, dunno" by a country mile.
If possible, bring the remote workers over to your office or travel to them and work together for like a week or two.
At a previous job we tested this with two offshore teams, one was brought onsite for a month and the other we worked with purely remotely. The onsite team's performance was far better. Later we swapped around and the performance picked up for the previous remote team. Moreover after having worked with someone together physically, worked remotely afterwards just works better. The effect is more than simply reduced siloing.
Yes, when the first remote team went back to be a remote team again, the performance was far better than original. Personally I know I work and communicate better after having worked with them on the same location.
I kinda miss the videos talking about game design as opposed to the process of game development. But I still enjoyed this.
Something I've been wanting you guys to do is a video on how to do character creation right. Every character creator I've seen has ended up sucking in one way or another.
I did not think this was possible but the extra creditz team seems just as hooked on Overwatch as I am..... and I'm really hooked.
Remote teams are huge in web development right now. A simple search on Stack Overflow for a Ruby on Rails job will bring up a number of companies that are 100% remote with no actual office location.
Katawa Shoujo is a really good example of this. Its a VN made by Four Leaf Studio that originated from 4chan.
Yup and it is considered one of the best VNs out there in terms of depth. It really says a lot when freaking 4chan of all things can make something so good when major developers screw up all the time due to mismanagement of the work.
tygonmaster and they did all that remotely. I don't think any of them actually met up IRL when developing. What I know is that they did a good enough job to make 4chan cry, even for a little bit.
I was just about to mention this. what they managed to the with a team from all around the world is truly incredible. sure it took several years but in the end it was well worth it.
The art is fantastic
I'm glad I watched this. If something like this comes up, I'll at least have an idea of what is out there structure wise.
Maybe also make a video covering what you as an employee can do to make sure that you're not only as productive as someone in the office, but also that the management and other team members know it. Working from home is difficult. Not so much because the work is different or the fact that there are more distractions (though the latter one is certainly true), but because many people still feel most comfortable being around people, rather than just talking to a screen all day.
This was full of useful tips, even as a non-game developer!
LoL Half the people thought this was about remotes and not Workers on Remote locations xD
Oh, I love the young, who have no idea of the world of Design and Development. They are so pure :3
"Uptick" LOL I had to pause the video for a minute because I was laughing so much. :-D
Can you talk about tower defence games plz
I think that is a great idea for a topic.
thanks Darth Kaas
great video guys. this actually applies to all kinds of remote work, I'm in the architecture field in a remote office and this felt very similar to what you described. although we might use different terminology for our work from game developers it sounds very similar to my life at the moment!
perfect timing for this video
words of wisdon, again. Loving this to bits. Cheers!
I absolutely, 100% thought this episode was going to be about the design of remote controls by the title and thumbnail. I'm not sure how EC would tie that into game development, but I think if anyone could it would be them.
Love the artstyle of this one!
Otem's Defiance team, HyperBerry Games, is a 6 person team, all of us are Venezuelans but 3 are in Spain and the other 3 (including me) are in Venezuela. We managed to coordinate and work alongside nicely using a loot of tools like GitHub, SourceTree, Skype, Google Hangouts and Whats App. We had to overcome the time difference and the problems Venezuela is going trough like the energy emergency which means I had a black out of 2 to 4 hours every day... But we managed to deliver a full game (our first game) in a year and a half :)
Kind of wild coming back to this video after COVID. :D
This episode was very informative thanks and the art was beautiful
Been working as a web designer for a small firm at home, man, this video would have been so useful to see and maybe show them as well.
I was easily tempted by the idea of working from home, but then the workload starting only piling up with no one to rely too, because they were too busy. Constant calls, of seeing how work is going was also a nuisance, at the same time giving me more to do. (make these applications for these firms and also manage these websites when you can, the owners need a change chop chop).
Felt like a nightmare so i decided to quit, seeing this made me rethink things though.
EC must have a time machine, this is far too relevant now
>From the company's side, it helps to pitch in to cover necessary expenses, such as PC upgrades or internet bills, that allow remote team members to keep working efficiently and show that their work is valued.
Uhhh... there is a problem from both parties if they aren't covering your internet.
that's a very nice topic to have in the channel, nicely done!
Loved the guest art this week!
Realistic Tables.
From the title and picture I thought this was an episode of how remotes gets developed. I wasn't expecting this at all!? Where's my remote development episode xp!
Yass finally Exctra Credits again ^u^ I don't really feel the games you might not have tried is a valid substitute for this
I disagree, they may not be analysis videos but they still talk about design and execution. It's always neat to hear what Dan or James have to say about games themselves instead of using them as examples to deliver a point.
Who's here during the pandemic?
Who isn’t?
One of the most overlooked things you can buy your remote (and in-office) workers:
HEADPHONES WITH MICS.
This killed me when I was 100% remote. People would use their onboard mic, and it was TERRIBLE. I couldn't hear them, we got endless echoes, and office sounds would take over the conversation. Remote people wouldn't buy the ones that worked best for the office because they already had their own headphones and were loathe to buy ones JUST for work.
Also, in meetings, have a good speakerphone for the remote people. You don't even need one of those crazy set-ups that large offices have. Logitech makes a few that are USB and work great.
I literally just got hired on to a remote team. I really didnt want to be remote but here I am. It sucks. I have no idea what anyone could possibly do to make it better. everyone has been so nice and friendly and has helpful as possible but I just cant shake the feeling that Im all alone. I am on the other side of the country all by myself while everyone else is all by them selves on the other corners of the country. Im scared to start this job by itself, never mind being all alone.
I love nick's art style.
I expected this to be about actual remotes and their design.
You fellas should do a video about that, or controllers or something
I really needed this. I think a lot of this stuff could be reflected on to outsourced animation work as well. Which makes me feel better about the shitshows I've been hired by.