Back in lockdown — what have we learned?
Remote working — efficiency opportunity or disaster waiting to happen? Almost two years on, and Covid is still an issue around the world, and many people are still working remotely. Here in the Netherlands we recently saw new restrictions announced, including the recommendation to once again have everyone work from home where possible. Many companies were unexpectedly thrust into remote working with the advent of the coronavirus, and some have done better than others. There are a number of common pitfalls with remote work that can tank productivity, but if you dodge those there are also ways to keep you and your team happy and productive while working from home!
Yvora started up during the early days of the coronavirus. In the Netherlands where Yvora is based, the government recommended that people work from home where possible, and we followed that advice — meaning that our first staff came on board remotely, and we’ve all been working remotely for more than a year.
Companies around the world have been grappling with how to handle this transition, but the experience of actually starting a company is something else. We know we aren’t the only ones in this boat, so we reached out to some other indie companies to share their experiences about remote working. After the interviews, we’ll wrap up the article with the main pros and cons for remote work! Here we go…
The Cast
Simon is the founder of Yvora Game Studio, based in Amsterdam. Yvora is a young startup with innovative plans to create an ever changing and intimate gaming experience. Working together with trusted partners in the Dutch gaming industry, their goal is to develop and release a new playground for creative gamers.
Marie-José is the CEO of Virtual Play, a Dutch studio which aims to innovate with games, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. They have created a range of Applied Games for private clients in the fields of education, medicine, culture, and infrastructure. For instance, ReValidate! which provides a means for regaining motion and strength in the wrist after a wrist fracture. They also work on entertainment games of their own.
Fabio Ferrara is the Game Director/Designer and Sound & 3D Artist at Chubby Pixel, an independent game studio based in Italy. Recent releases include old school 3D platformer Woodle Deluxe. They wrote a very interesting article on game development during the Covid-19 situation — it has lots of useful information and links to other related articles!
Without further ado, here are our insights:
Starting Up — Interviews and Introductions
Did you find it harder to conduct interviews with prospective staff remotely? Does it influence what you’re looking for in an employee?
Simon, Yvora:
Yes, it’s a lot harder. You want to have the feeling if someone fits in your team and non-verbal communication is very important to get that feeling. This is quite hard through a camera. Also the walk to a coffee machine, talking about “koetjes en kalfjes” (for the non-Dutch, idle chat about stuff like the weather) is important for me to get to know someone a bit better.
Marie-Jose, Virtual Play:
Yes, it seems much harder to get a good notion of people’s character and social skills. Through a camera you can’t be sure if people would look you in the eye, for instance. But also a lot of other body language gets lost. For us as a small company it is very important that we get a good vibe, that we get along with people, and that we can trust them. Not being able to do live interviews has definitely been a challenge. I must say however that it went quite well for us — whether that’s because we got lucky with the people we hired, or because we gave the selection process some extra attention.
How did you handle team building and introductions with everyone working from home?
Simon, Yvora:
We organized some online events like an escape room, doing some games online, and having a drink during and after demos. But it’s way too limited for really getting to know people. Remote working can feel like doing things alone which add up to a shared experience, rather than truly ‘doing something together’.
Marie-Jose, Virtual Play:
Basically, group calls with cameras. It’s never quite as smooth as face to face can be, but with a few icebreaker questions and a little chatting it works well. You do need to keep an eye on who is speaking and make sure less outgoing people don’t get sidelined, but if you pick the right team it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
We also take the last working hour every Friday for a call where the whole team would chat and play some games together. There are online word games, Jackbox party games, and other things that can easily be done during a Discord call.
In addition to that we have a specific Discord channel for random chat, which has an important function in day to day relaxing, small talk, and getting to know people.
Fabio Ferrara, Chubby Pixel:
Working remotely is never easy, so try not to be too pretentious with your team members: since you’re always distant, it’s easy to be offended or misunderstood. You can try to use extra hours for external team activities like playing an online video game! This can definitely improve team bonding.
Running Smoothly
What kind of software do you use for text discussions and video calls, and why?
Simon, Yvora:
Discord for chat, as this is the preferred tool in the gaming industry (meaning that most people already have an account). For video calls, we use Discord or Google Meet. Google Meet works well because we also use the Google suite for our mail and calendars, so everything integrates nicely.
Marie-Jose, Virtual Play:
We use Discord for communication and HacknPlan for planning, along with Google Sheets for more in-depth tracking of the progress of assets. Having a single sheet where you can see what assets are animated, art-complete, etc. helps greatly for maintaining an overview.
Fabio Ferrara, Chubby Pixel:
Communication is obviously a must, and it’s something that has to be done in all forms: Email, Chat, Voice Chat and Video Chat are all essentials. The second most important thing is to keep track of everything that has been done by every team member.
Here is some of the best software that we use for this:
Chat & Voice / Video Calls
- Skype (mainly for chatting and voice)
- Discord (for chatting)
- Zoom (for video conferences)
- Slack (for chat with the whole team and team groups)
Project Management
- Trello (for smaller teams from 2 to 10)
- Jira (for larger teams from 10 to 50)
- Monday (for large teams from 50 to 100)
How do you reproduce the chitchats at the coffee machine?
Simon, Yvora:
Standups in the morning help, but are not really an alternative. So if you have an idea, I would like to hear!
Marie-Jose, Virtual Play:
We asked our team to always be present in a Discord call while ‘at their desks’ (e.g. not during lunch or other breaks). Most of the time everyone is muted (and then also no cameras), but it means that people with questions can just speak up and get a conversation going right away. Usually that means swapping to a separate channel with the relevant people, but it gives everyone the chance to hear a bit more of what’s going on. Of course this relies on having a team that isn’t too large, otherwise you might end up with too many interruptions.
The other thing we do is to expect regular updates at given times every few hours, even if it’s just a quick message and a screenshot or gif of what people have been working on. This keeps the server feeling alive, gives people the chance to comment on what others are doing, and lets everyone see that progress is being made. These updates are posted in the channels relevant for those topics, enabling everyone to look back into the log to find any info they might want later on.
Do you feel that remote work causes any negative impact in terms of efficiency and/or creativity? Is it delaying your project in any sense?
Simon, Yvora:
Yes and no: for single tasks, you are more productive working remotely. But teamwork, like brainstorming, team building, solving challenges together etc. is less ideal in a remote setting. So the first weeks you go faster, because all the tasks are already sorted out together, but after some weeks/months, productivity goes down, because then your task pipeline dries up and needs teamplay to get filled again.
Marie-Jose, Virtual Play:
I think we adjusted rather quickly to a remote working environment, especially compared to what I’ve heard from other companies. We did however notice a big drop in productivity with some of our less experienced coworkers (mainly interns), so that impacted some of our planning in the end.
When everyone is working remotely, you can see a bit of tunnel vision set in. People might get stuck on tasks and instead of asking for help, just keep trying on their own. This is also a risk with creative tasks when there’s a very clear style required for the project, where artists might start off on the wrong foot — in an office you can easily glance over their shoulder, but working remotely you need to ask for regular updates to see how it’s going. The trick is balance — enough updates to keep on top of things, and not so many that it constantly interrupts people’s work.
I think that is a general challenge: when work isn’t going as well as you’d hoped, it’s harder to put the finger on what’s the issue at hand. Is somebody having trouble focusing at home, is someone having personal issues? Often it’s the lack of looking over someone’s shoulder that keeps them stuck longer in a situation — where normally it would have been discussed sooner, or solved by noticing what is up. Working remotely asks for more effort in communication, from all sides. But if you manage to get that going, then it can work very well in my experience.
Fabio Ferrara, Chubby Pixel:
When working remotely, you tend to work in a bit of a vacuum and it can feel like you have no idea whether you are doing a good job or not, unless you get lots of feedback. Feedback can be provided directly with screens or mini videos that can help to understand what is the actual feedback referring to. A useful software for this is Teamviewer, used to remote control a computer from another: we use it internally even when two programmers need to work on the same script file.
Documentation is important to be clear and precise, you can’t afford to have docs that are not understandable by the whole team. If this occurs, the project manager should improve the documentation or even rewrite it completely. This includes both technical documentation, game design documentation and assets documentation.
The reality is that the single developer is going to make a lot of decisions in a vacuum without feedback most of the time, so having as much background as they can is necessary so that the decisions he takes are fairly good.
Be sure that everyone is using the same software for writing documentation (Word and OpenOffice are the most common ones) since passing files from one user to another could create problems.
Writing documentation through cloud services is probably the best way to avoid any kind of problem: we usually use Google Docs since it includes even sheets and files for presentations. Everyone can edit the same file online in real time.
Conclusions
Although these indie studios come from different places and focus on different kinds of game, there was some notable overlap between their answers on certain points. Here are the main takeaways that emerged over the course of our interviews.
- There are both pros and cons to working remotely, and with intelligent leadership and the right workflow you can maximize the benefits to concentration and flexibility while minimizing isolation and maintaining communication within your team.
- A range of tools are available to facilitate remote working, with no obvious best option. Building the right team and finding people who work well remotely is more important than picking the perfect software for communicating and planning.
- It’s important to maintain regular communication with remote working team members, but you must do so in a way that doesn’t cause constant breaks in work flow — planning software and regular mini-updates can allow you to keep track of how people are doing with their tasks without needing to interrupt them to ask. Facilitate and encourage inter-team communication, and provide an opportunity for some non-work interaction to let people get to know each other more.
Hopefully you found this informative, and if you have your own thoughts on these questions we’d love to hear from you! We may update the article in future if we get more good responses. Feel free to follow our Twitter and get in touch!
Until next time!
