Remote Working at Spry Fox

[Music] okay hey a magic fight and this is remote working it's by Fox it's a case study of how spy Fox does high quality indie games while being fully remote and in detail we're going to talk about why we chosen to be a fully remote company what kind of skills a good remote developer needs over and above their technical skills what kind of workflows and tools do we use it's Bo fox in order to be effective and efficient and perhaps most interestingly how do we take a group of people who have now been in the same room together and make them into a trusted and creative team like I said I'm Andrew free I've been industry for about ten years I've worked in big hundred and fifty person co-located teams I've worked in small 15-person co-located teams and now for the last two years I've been working for spy Fox from my dining I'm just very like before

it some disclaimers I'm not standing in front of you as the director of production of spy Fox or anything like that were a very small company were very flat company so I'm documenting this mainly because I have an interest in process and workflow isn't and that kind of thing also we're not perfect I'm not saying that this is how everyone should work but it's we have had some successes and we've had some failures I want to defer to tell you about it so spy fought some people who don't know we've been around since 2010 these are some of the games that we've made alpha bear in the bottlenecks coming out very soon on mobile is going to set the world on fire and we are a fully distributed team so there's 11 of us on three different continents of five different time zones that's me the yellow dot in the UK we've got four people in Seattle but they don't work together by habit they they meet up every now and again I have a chat but they don't there's no spy Fox head office they work in we also

have two people in San Francisco but and they've just very recently started co-working together but that's kind of experiment and we're not quite sure how that's going yet what's not the kind of company that's had loads of cash in order to fly everyone have one of those fancy company holidays every now and again so this is actually this is a picture of the most by foxes that I've ever been in a room as David one of the co-founders in the left Alex Ryan Pat Daniel the other co-founder of me this is a last year at GDC so that's six there's still people in the company that I've never ever met face to face why do we choose to be remote well instead I'm going to ask you why should you be co-located there was this blog post rich g42 blog spot.com UK which kind of went viral around the turn of the year where he talked about his terrible experiences working involves cabal room when it held no one from BAU was in the room I'm gonna piss them off but he was saying that the kind of busy noisy distracting environment is very very difficult for him to focus and be productive this is a photo of Bungie not all so hope there's no one from Bungie knew him and I've worked in offices like that a large open barn like spaces where

there's lots and lots of noise and lots and lots of distracting distraction I found it very difficult to work in them and there's some science to back that up for instance this article says it's damaging to workers attention spans productivity creativity and satisfaction to work in an open plan office in fact people where thirty years ago was talking about how open plan offices can be distracting to productivity of creative teams and yet we seem to see it as kind of a default in the industry I was working at a studio grab the opportunity to build up a new building and they chose to have an open plan office I think management see is a kind of easy way to like that the story is that you're facilitating communication because one person could overhear another person talking and then fill in the gaps in their knowledge but I see that as kind of like a hack if your workflows and tools and processes aren't good enough to have that kind of communication then you're really just hacking it and you're harming productivity by using open plan instead you can have good offices so in the top

right is robot entertainment is it anyone from well button statement here no well they are they seem to have a very good office very lots of square foot per developer baffles between areas to keep the noise down and I'm also think I'm right in saying that they have offices to breakout interview if you really want to you know hunker down Stack Exchange in the bottom left have gone fully like all in on giving new offices it's giving that developers their own individual offices because they believe that such a productivity boost but these things are obviously expensive and if you don't want to go big maybe you should go home and there's there's some science that says remote workers can be 30% more productive fewer sick days quite a work environment so that's one of the main reasons that we chosen as byfox to work remotely is because we want to give our developers really really productive environments the other big reason is because you want to have a certain type of developer working for us we want really really high quality developers who are also really really interested in working on the types of games that we make and if we restrict that to say only people who are in the

Seattle area then we've got this tiny tiny little intersection to choose from and maybe those guys are coming in jobs and they can't leave right now or something well instead if we drop that restriction he said we've got this massive massive pool to pick from so those are the two main reasons there's a big buck coming up it's not for everyone remote working takes a special skill set and a special personality type over and above being a good developer is we've had many developers some developers work for us who have been very high quality developers but haven't managed to make them up working stick so I'm going to talk a little bit about the type of skills that you need as developer at the type of skills you should look for if you're hiring a remote developer so the biggest one the most obvious one is maybe that these guys have to be comfortable with being alone at a lot of time and that's great that's got some flexible benefits I mean I can you know sit in my underpants and play Taylor Swift and sing along at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and it you know we're not going to bother anyone at least only my only my partner but it can be difficult

for some people especially if you self-identify as say an extrovert now luckily we're in the industry where there's not too many of those people around but if you do and you need that kind of day-to-day personal contact in order to keep your energy levels high then you might find it difficult to work on moving co-working spaces can help but be aware that not all co-working spaces are borne II called the place that I work at very occasionally is full of you know business consultants and a guy who runs an organic t-shirt company they're not the same kind of support network that a co-located game development team with me so they also these developers have to be autonomous they have to be able to function on their own without this support network or have some kind of other support network waiting in the wings to help and there's a certain class of problem that I know engineers come across I don't I'm actually sure if it comes happens in other disciplines that I call the wood for the trees problem where I've got a bug and I'm looking at the code line by line and I it all looks like it should

work and I can't figure out why it's not working and in those situations I used to be able to tap and never develop on a shoulder and you'd look at my code and fix it very very quickly but I can't do that when I'm working my mone maybe everyone else is asleep maybe it's harder to do that on skype so your developers need the experience to be able to solve those problems by themselves without getting too frustrated so support networks can help maybe maybe your support network is online maybe it's reddit maybe it's Twitter maybe it's a co-working space or maybe it's just texting a buddy or using Skype they also have to be autonomous because they're going to come across points where they need to make decisions and it's going to be quicker for them to just take those decisions rather than consulting with the rest of the team so you need to be hiring a type of people who you can trust to make those decisions correctly or at least know that when they reach a decision they shouldn't be taking the nation stop-and-wait your developers need to be self-aware it's much much harder to pick up on professional as well as personal problems over Skype if you're in the

same office of someone it's easy to see if they're struggling with a problem but you can't do that when all you see of them is the occasional notification popping up in your chat lines so there needs to be self assessing and realizing when there's something they should be escalating and telling other people about in fact they should not be self-conscious about sharing issues this isn't to absolve responsibility for professional development from managers but it's much more of a two-way street than you would have in a co-located studio they need to be communicative this is really really this is such an important skill for a remote worker to know what someone's working on and to understand the reasoning behind the decisions they make they need to be getting that to you and whatever medium they're using and they need to know when there's things that should be broadcasting to the whole team rather than just leaving it and trying to remember to bring it up in the standup next time that happens if anything you want your developers to be erring on the side of over sharing information and that's not to say posting pictures of them in a swimsuit on the beach but they

want to be telling you too much so you can have a dial it back because it's very very hard to go the other way and tell them to start sharing more information time zones aren't specifically a skill but it's something you need to be aware of when you're hiring on my developers if you're hiring the best at anywhere in the world and then they could be working at any time of the day or night it's best if there's some kind of overlap between the rest of the team and this person so there's at least some time without having real-time communication I try to do that so this is this is roughly my time I'm in the green working in GMT in the UK and the most spy foxes tend to work kind of on a specific clock and you can see that I leave some hours back to come back late in the evening when I know people are going to be around in fact spy folks working hours are so erratic I can sometimes have people working when I wake up in the morning and I can sync up again at 8 o'clock in the morning but when you're hiring people be aware that this is going to obviously have an impact on private life so they need to

be aware when you're bring in the monitor there might be the best person in the world they might be really well suited to work in remotely but if they've got a very young family for instance and they can't commit to working those evening hours or whatever is suitable for them then maybe it's not the right the right job to go for so when you take all those things together autonomous trusted self-aware communicative it becomes apparent that even a possible remote developer cannot be a junior this is almost a definition of a senior developer so you can't have what I've experienced in many of those college students have worked on where you have a strata of junior developers and then some medium experience and then some very senior developers you need everyone across the board to be high quality because they need those skills and they need that experience to be able to cope let's talk about communication bandwidth so this this problem is really the call issue that's going to ripple through the rest of the talk in that you're going to spend a lot of your time talking to your

team via IRC or text or Skype or whatever and the the pure heart of the matter is that text really sucks if you use if you're working in a chat room or something then you can have threading issues where you're not actually sure when a response is an answer to a question or an answer to an earlier question and not only that but you can miss out on really really important audio visual cues that you would get when you're face to face for instance what my hands are doing right now where I'm looking where the pauses in my speech not just the pauses but what's the tone of my voice while I'm doing it and this is illustrated by a key & peele sketch that's quite funny where they're trying to communicate via text message to arraign arrange a time to go out in the evening and peel and and top left says I assume we meet at the bar whatever I don't care he's trying to be casual he's trying to be easygoing and when he gets his text he's like whatever how could he not care he's really outraged about it he only reads everything in the kind of aggressive tone of voice so it's clear that text not only do you miss information when

you're communicating your vertex but you also miss interpreting communication it's very easy for emotions to get quite high context that happens sometimes it's byfox will have be having a conversation you'll get quite passionate quite quickly and when we jump through a voice chat to try and sort it out things get diffused very very very quickly so it's obviously not a real issue it's just that people who miss understanding what's going on so you're going to spend a lot of time trying to phrase your communications so they're there exact so they're not ambiguous so also that it's accommodating for other people because you don't want any of those misunderstandings and that has kind of a weird side effect that text communication can be really formal and so the supply focus atmosphere for dating from a date a day-to-day perspective is quite a formal atmosphere for what's obsessively a very creative indie company so what workflows and tools do we give our people to try and combat this the first thing we do be likely to go back to the heart of the

so look at team size so this is a 20 person team and these are the communication vectors that one person has to take into account for that whole team and if that's if this is a remote team then like we've already said you can have to put so much more effort into communication that these going to be multiplied it becomes much more intense and it starts to dominate your day to day function so what we do is try and cut everything down the type of games we want to make just so happen to be suited to working in small teams so we will drop everything down to 2 to 5 people at most we once had a game that went to 10 people and I don't think anyone the company really enjoyed the experience when you're choosing your chat lines there's a list of features you should be considering enough priority order now from the most important is rooms so we will take a bunch of people on the same project and we'll create a project room sometimes more than one project going for different subtopics and everyone can go in there and that will stop the rest of the studio getting spammed with messages persistent searchable histories

are important because that means we can scroll back to 6 months ago and see that URL that we needed for that advertising client or whatever mentions are great if for instance a art director will spam the multiple projects and you want to pull him into your room when he's needed so you can mention and pull him in guests and external accounts are fantastic for working with contractors and finally it's great if you can take that group of people and jump straight into a voice call or a video call with that with that whole room for most of our tech space community x da q meant stuff we use Google Docs and that's kind of self-evident I think even co-located teams is trying to users because the comments and history in the collaboration tools are so very very very good we use a kind of blog post style design document where we'll have a big starting blog post in the Google Docs and then further blog posts will appear above that documenting how the design changes over time there's more details on that at this URL so I won't go into it now we use Trello for project

management we can get away with that because well like I said we're working with such more teams but whatever project management tool you end up using then sir you will find that some people are better updating it than others and really really want to be as a militia can about getting these people to keep a thing up-to-date because as soon as one person stops updating Inc than the trust and whatever the whole team is doing is starts to fall apart a little bit we use Dropbox for cloud storage and I mean there were lots of alternative this they are getting as good as Dropbox was one thing we use it for is internal builds so I can put a build at Project X slash latest and everyone can know that they can go there to play whatever the latest build is they don't have to sink anything from source control they don't have to install anything it's also got some cool little features like I can use the OS X native screen grabbing tools grab a section of saying UI that I want to iterate on or highlight an issue with and that will put a link to it directly

in my clipboard and then I can paste that into chat we also have some tools for dealing with time zones if you're the guy who is working overnight like I do then you want to be really really ready for when everyone starts waking up have stuff ready for them to look at for what you've done during the day and be logging what you've been doing sometimes they'll wake up and there'll be a mini essay for me in Skype about what I've been doing also communicate the presence that you have so I've already shown you that I'll have a gap in the evening and then I'll come back and I will leave again and I will say both times I'm afk now for a few a few hours back later and then later on an evening or say I'm going to bed now and also if I'm checking Skype on my mobile or something like vision is an example I'm in the bottom Tech's there and I'm saying I'm still a FK but I can help answer your question but you not expect I'm communicating that they're not they shouldn't expect me to be able to you know make any code changes or anything like that you also use Google Calendar the sort of time zones or at all like what time zone buddy and personally I have the kind of concept in my head of

spy Fox time which is kind of West Coast time and I know that I'm eight hours behind that so if anyone talks about 10:00 a.m. and I know for me that's 6:00 p.m. so this is perhaps the most interesting area to talk about how do we take this group of people who have never ever ever been in a room together how do we take them then turn them into a creative team that can work together and trust each other and I think Trust is really really important aspect for a team you need to know when you can hand off work to someone else you need to know what other people's skill areas are and you want entity the same for you but a huge part of trust is familiarity he's getting to know someone knowing what their what their foibles are and what they like and even interest what their sense of humours but it's hard to do that when we can't have in-person socializing you know there are time zones and there were oceans in the way of us getting in the same room together so what we try to do and haven't actually thought of a really

good term for this I'm not quite happy with this term but we try to interject this space for personality into our workflows so everything that we do we try and get a little crowbar in there and just leave a tiny little gap where we can be ourselves and then everyone can get and get to know us just by working with us every different the easiest most obvious way doing that is by using video as much as possible not only is it important for getting over those barriers that takes communication has but also just by seeing your face and what jokes you laugh at other people they can get to know you don't have a dress code because you want this to have a really really low barrier to entry there are certain people in the company who shall remain nameless let's just call them David Eddy who I've jumped on a video call with and he's very obviously still in bed with the headboard behind him and he's just woken up but that's fine because we're having that face-to-face communication you know we're getting that level of fidelity in a canal communications that we wouldn't have a voice voice calls are a distant

second best there are some people in the company I mean if you all fill your milk company you're naturally going to hire people who are somewhat loners and then they won't want to jump onto video calls so this kind of it's kind of self-defeating so there are people in the company who will yawn use voice by habit and it does work it is better what what it's better than text by far but it's a distance I can best a video but one little hack you can do is change your default avatar to something with your face and with your eyes and with your mouth not a cartoon with your eyes and with your mouth and then people can look at that as you're talking in a voice call or they can look at that as you're typing in text and that massively massively helps people to understand what you're saying so we have a bi-weekly company call that we scheduled on Monday in the morning for West Coast people in the evening for me and that's just for sharing information between the different projects because there's obviously no I can't walk past someone else's desk and accidentally see what they're working on

and say oh that's cool show me because there is no desk mean walk past so instead we do it on this call and we also have bi-weekly one-on-ones with Dave or Daniel our co-founders and that's a chance for us to talk about personal issues a professional issue as professional development and here Noah so that's a much much higher frequency than you might be used to in a co-located team that's because like I said it's so much easy for these issues to develop quickly and slip through the cracks with a remote team we have two global chat rooms one for random chat and one for company business although we're not actually that strict about what goes where we're not going to Stanford anyone for doing that and again like it's just a space where you can be yourself and if something cool comes up in the news like save ours VR news the other day and that will go into the into the global chat and we can talk about it for the for a minute and what it means for the industry one little thing that we have and this is this is such a tiny little thing once I've explained it you'll be like what really but it made such a big difference when we started doing it is there when we sit down in

the morning and you're ready to start working as a spy folks then you open the chat line and you type in good morning and you enter and that's it and there's no expectation of apply for this so it's important that the tenth person to say I work doesn't get annoying applies saying good morning but it's doing several things so it's communicating presence obviously it's saying I'm here I'm ready to work but it's also random noise and it stops that sometimes you know if if there's no Velvia or announcement for a couple of days then that global chat can sometimes be a bit quiet but this way there's just a little bit of random noise in there and it starts to feel more like a company rather than a bunch of contractors who happen to be on the same skype channel and it's a little bit of space for personality I mean you can use whatever method you like for saying hello some people do it in different languages I went through a phase of googling Shakespearean greetings we also have different flavours so for instance you just bought the jukebox Tuesday's is where you say good morning bass what you're listening to right now but if days are a really interesting social

experience there's something that's just a little bit special about having a birthday in a team in a co-located team maybe you will go in the kitchen you cut some cake and you wish happy birthday to the person but we can't do that because we haven't got a kitchen so instead what we do is we open up a secret chat group with everyone apart from the birthday person in there it's supposed to be a few days beforehand but because we're a bit rubbish is normally today of the person's birthday and we'll all be in there and we'll open up a collaborative drawing tool that like at the moment we tend to use Google Docs again and we'll all draw silly pictures and were like right birthday messages for a person here's some of the examples that we do and and you know this important that like art style is no barrier here although these are some of the better ones I particularly like for instance Pat's dreamy eyes in the top-left they're pretty cool Pat's on the front oh by the way if you in fortunately is taken so but it's great I mean it's this is as much for the other people in spy

Fox as it is for the person's birthday this the business boost but both phases gets URL at the end of the day and he gets to open it and say thank you but before that everyone else has had this great shared experience where we've been bouncing ideas back and forth and then laughing each other's jokes or terrible artwork or something and again it's a space a personality a space to express yourself within our normal workflows there also some things that haven't worked as well so weekly multiplayer seem like a really good idea for getting to know each other but it didn't really stick possibly because of time zones it's very difficult for me for instance as they are up to between 3:00 a.m. in the morning forever now whenever when everyone else finishes working but if you are going to try it that you want to favor games that are collaborative and chatty rather than games there are more frantic so for instance minecraft is a much better experience because you have that day/night cycle and you can stop them talk and plan then say Team Fortress 2 which is just non-stop actually we found it quite difficult to find games that have this property so if maybe there's a potential market there well actually one of our projects work

on the moment we're kind of viewing through this lens so it's kind of an interesting space to be in so that's all I got cap then team-building is really hard for my team if you can use if you can inject spacer personality into your workflows and it becomes easy and you can start to build that trust that you need communication takes so much effort so much time I mean I'm going to say to you that termination takes effort and then you believe here thinking communication takes effort and if you actually try that you're gonna be like holy this takes a lot of effort it's good it's gonna surprise you and the workflows I've shown you here don't scale well beyond ten people however it's an extremely extremely productive environment you can get so much done focusing and really getting in the zone and what you're doing without people distracting you and if you can put people together from a huge talent pool who are trusted and who trust each other and their talented then together you can make great games so I'm going to leave you with some resources there's some communities there it's like exchange and reddit and as also I was going to put some blogs up but this github page it's

got a fantastic community resource of all kinds of blogs and blogs that you should look at the slides are beyond my website in due course you should check out by Foxconn for latest games and you should follow me on twitter at t enpm thank you very much [Applause] I'm not sure if we have any time for questions do we we do yes okay Goodman all right the question is do we have a chat client that we use yeah we we use Skype we are always looking at other ones to see what they can bring to the table though because Skype has got his issues but I mean the video chatting in Skype is so much better than almost I mean even gets better than Google Hangouts in some ways like Google Hangouts is fantastic but it caps out at ten people we've got 11 people in the company so makes it kind of hard to use yes thank you

okay cool next the chores instructions working from home yeah like you know laundry's so for source control it's really up to the individual teams we've settled on git and mercurial because they are quite good precipitate distribute the team so it seems like using still school might be a good idea do you have somebody host we host ourselves ongoing server and to avoid distractions well routines and headphones help getting the sell out games have changed up Sheldon sitting down and knowing that now you're going to be focusing on working giving yourself a timetable lunch is going to be from 12:30 or

whatever known that you're not going to stop until then those are really good for getting yourself into the groove but then once you're in that groove and at least for me I found that I can then relax that schedule quite a lot but I'm still able to jump into like start working and get my house done without getting distracted too much yeah if you're wondering if you had found a good collaboration tool for technical join that works on both tablets and PC no we haven't looked I mean we're looking for collab to drawing for the birthdays as much as anything so what do you guys use for like your whiteboarding session type we just tend to just hash it out or wash it out of a voice chat leave notes in the skype group or we will just leave it to one person and trust them to get it right thank you Thanks this is less of a question more of a statement I work remotely for about ten years on a 50 person team and I agree that it's harder with such a

larger team but one of the things that I think is really important is don't be afraid to bother other people because if you don't bother them then you generally won't get a sense of what's going on with other people if they're not willing to you know kind of bring it forth themselves so don't don't be afraid to talk up and and bother other people you think are busy yeah overshare first of all I want to ask you if you've ever tried using sakoku it's a cocoa yes hands-down better than anything I've seen so for wolf video chatting sharing screens it's a virtual map of an office and so it works really well okay anyways ococ oh okay have you tried any virtual team building really interested on what you could do in a team building type outside of you know obviously playing games listen everybody's into but just specifically

for building that trust especially with new teams well I mean like I said like we're trying we try to do that in what we try to build that into everything we're doing like the birthdays thing one thing that we tried we tried the the video gaming thing it didn't really take off one thing we did do was we made a silly stupid video for use what's the what what the Fox say which was like a big YouTube thing last year and we made a silly video of all us miming to we're sending it back and forth over like a number week sending each other little clips to put into the video and that was quite a good experience we should so we need to make another viral fox song yeah anybody so um do you have a developed process for sort of identifying where issues arise in remote collaboration like collaborators that

aren't really working well with the or or sort of problems in the collaborative structure of this basically just debugging the process essentially yeah so we we come by that but just being really really open with each other and when you've got small team sizes then problem people do highlight themselves much more obviously and it's very easy for someone to bring something up in the company talk and in like the good morning thing like that becoming company policy was just me saying hey we should do this thing and then the next day always company policy you know we could be like the owners of the company you're really really open and easy to talk to and the whole team trust each other so well that we can discuss this kind of stuff quite easily so a team member can if they're having problems they bring it up or you bring it up and you talk it out basically yes because because like I said the people you're hiring should be

self-aware they should be you know they want to be bringing these problems to you as much as you're bringing the problems to them and and and yeah we just we get fired by hiring really great people thank you one other thing I think it M we're done oh no we're done now I don't know okay we've got the Batpod boom though I think which is where room 3000 so if anyone's to come to room 3000 then we'll do some more wrap up well just outside in the hallway thanks very much [Applause]