wfmag.cc \ 35Distributed game development: the future?Toolbox
Shane McCafferty at 42
years old, doing
distributed game
development from the
comfort of his sofa.The bot we’ve written is a core piece of
technology, and we are constantly giving it
new abilities. For instance, when we want
to push a build of the game to a store front,
we just ask the bot to do it. Importantly, the
bot uses exactly the same communication
mechanism as we use for everything else,
and like the developers, it will communicate
asynchronously which allows the developer to
have ‘conversations’ with it at a time which fits in
with them. This tool is one of the key places that
we turn the question of ‘Why did that person
need to interrupt someone?’ into a solution,
which ensures that it doesn’t happen again.
Following these rules – identifying ‘bad’
communication and providing processes and
tools to cover those situations – has allowed us
to become progressively more efficient. We don’t
have long meetings. We do have regular video
calls, but they aren’t drawn out. We generally
all know where we are up to, given our open
communication on Slack and by using our suite
of tools. Those times are more for ‘face time’.
It’s important to know who you’re working with,
to build relationships, to talk.
REMOTE WORKING BENEFITS
What benefits does remote working bring? It’s
easy to spot the ones for the workers. You get to
work from where you want, and assuming your
asynchronous communication procedures are
correctly implemented, this can also be when
you want. You can be located anywhere in the
world – potentially, a different place every day.
What about for the business? You can get the
very best people regardless of whether they
want to relocate. They’re choosing the time and
place where they can do their very best work,
somewhere where they won’t get interrupted.
You will most likely find that you get increased
productivity from them.
Admittedly, remote working isn’t for everyone.
Some people want to have regular social contact
with the people they work with. You can take
these procedures and implement them in
combination with the classic single or multi-site
office, however. Give your workers the choice.
If they want to be in an office, let them. If you
can only get the person you want on your
team by allowing them to work from a remote
location, let them. If you have someone who
needs to relocate for personal reasons and can
no longer commute into the office, give them the
option of working remotely.
All these options can work, but all of them will
fall apart if you don’t have your communication
procedures correctly set up – more so if some
of your team are working in the same location.
They need to use the same communication
systems, otherwise, there will become a ‘them
and us’ situation, with meetings being held on-
site with remote parties excluded.SCALING UP
The remaining question is, can this scale to
much larger teams? Could a thousand people
work on a project completely distributed with
the same efficiency as they do in current triple-A
game development? That we cannot say for
sure right now. But by following the process
to identify and fix bad communication, I think
it could work, and would allow the industry to
scale to new heights. Shahid Kamal Ahmad is
the MD of Ultimatum
Games, which is a
completely distributed
games developer.
He commands the
company from his shed.TOOLS OF
THE TRADE
“The software that I use for
remote collaboration is as
follows,” D’Archambaud says.
“Slack for asynchronous
communication with both
people and software bots
that we write. Slack video
calling for face-to-face
meetings and discussions
(previously used Discord).
Bespoke Slack bot that
communicates with our
bespoke Jenkins server farm.
Google Drive File Stream for
Jenkins jobs to easily push
data to Google Drive for the
team to access.”Distributed game development: the future?Toolbox