Saturday, November 9, 2013

The dull side of it - Part 1.

"Jens, I truly need to study an email, but the e-mail queue is taking forever to download! It really is some guy named Brian that has sent a enormous file as an attachment, almost certainly 1MB. If not much more!"

The other day I came to think of the above circumstance, when my dear father was in the need to have to study some email on the family pc back in 1997/1998. A couple of days earlier I had come in contact with a fellow named Brian Greenstone who was functioning on a freeware game and had asked on a game news internet site if anybody was interested in assisting him. I volunteered to try and make some music. I was 18 and studying music throughout my final year of higher school, with a life-extended interest in games I thought this was a very good chance to combine the two interest of mine. We discussed more than e-mail and he sent me the test builds of the game as basic attachments and I in turn sent my attempts at writing music back. My loved ones had a 14.4 Kbps or possibly a 28.8 Kbps modem and sending and downloading these attachments took a little while... But that was how Brian worked with his game (and the following games also!), all content material, as far as I know, was passed back and forth in between the individuals operating on the game making use of nothing but email.

As I believed about it I figured that possibly some interesting weblog material could be identified right here. So, a couple of weblog posts will take a look at how we have organized it right here at Frictional and hopefully give a tip or two to those in a comparable predicament. To kick it all off I'm going to quickly go by means of how the company offers with day-to-day communication amongst its members.

Frictional consist of five men and women, 4 reside in Sweden, one particular in Spain and we do not have an workplace or place where we typical meet. We do all the perform on our games from our homes and by employing standard applications and technologies, all which are cost-free. Significantly like other organizations our perform hours are from eight in the morning to five in the evening and it is necessary that you are on the web on MSN throughout that period so that it is easy to get in touch with every single other. Even though we also speak more than the telephone and by means of e-mail, MSN is our major tool for every day communication. The exception is on Fridays when we meet up more than Skype for our weekly meetings. The basic concept is that news concerning the firm (possibly we have had a effective weekend sale) is shared to all the members and that all members do a fast "This I have carried out lately" presentation.

We split up our function in three week periods, exactly where two weeks are the major period to perform on a specific job and the third week is an further week. The added week is utilised to make positive there is time to compensate, should a activity have had some problem or taken longer than two weeks. If any individual managed to finish inside two weeks, the third week is employed to operate on some unique assignment, generally anything that is a bit more fascinating and fun than the typical tasks. Ought to it be me, perhaps I spent two weeks generating footstep sounds for five varieties of surfaces and on the third week I can rather perform on making the sounds for a monster (which need to be a lot more intriguing than walking on surfaces). On the Monday and the end of every single three week period we have a "Show and tell" meeting on Skype where every person has documented what they have accomplished throughout the week and everybody can test it out (some gameplay, a new editor function, new level etc). We devote 1-two hours testing each and every others operate, create down feedback and pass it to the creator, followed by the voice meeting exactly where we give the most critical feedback and go over it.

That's fairly a lot it, only place on repeat! There is more work with the actual organisation and project arranging, all the function that relates to who does what when and so on, but that would make this darn extended. For subsequent post I will talk about the technique we use for file sharing, we have utilized the very same system because 2006 and have had some distinct options on exactly where it has been hosted.

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