Virtual Team vs. Established Headquarters

#1 I currently work for Badlands Games, a virtual team, and I find the hardest thing is modivation. Working from home is nice but it's quite difficult to put aside your lives while at home and work during your 'off' hours. Getting a good balance of social time and work time is difficult.

Having regular meetings once a week is a good start. If the team expects to meet every Tuesday at 7:00 PM EST then there is a better chance that people can schedule arount that time in order to be there. People are generally unwilling to reschedule though, so getting a day and time that the majority of people can be there is a good idea.

Having a forum up where people can post comments any time of day is a must. Getting people to go there and post is difficult especially if there is any sort of learning curve to using it.

Document, document, document. Write everything down in short, easy to read documents and post them on your forum. How to use the forums, what software the company is using, a list of members and there e-mail addresses, design documents, etc, all should be on the forum.

Make everything as easy to find as possible. People won't search for long. Your team isn't stupid but you should organize and write everything like they are. Confusing is multiplied by 10 when you can't sit down with your team in person.

Expect learning curves to take a while. The first assignment someone does should take them a long time. It will be a very frustrating process so be sure to encourage your team on a regular basis.

Make your first set of milestones very easy to reach. It will encourage members to participate more if they feel like they have accomplished something. If your team is struggling through the first thing they are doing and there is a list of 100 things that need to be done then chances are they are going to quit.

Get a bug tracking system. It's really important. Get people to use your bug tracking system. It's also really important.

If some of your members live near each other encourage them to meet. Knowing who you are working will take a lot less time in person then over the net.

/rambling

Alc

#2 Damn, I didn't see this til now :o

Thanks a lot for the advice. We do a lot of this already...weekly meetings, a forum, IRC channel, documents...it is quite a bit to manage, and sometimes we go swinging back and forth, but stuff gets done :)

I think one of the hardest things is giving people a reason to be a part of the team. I try to look for people that want to make something good happen, and have the time and ability to do it. Making everyone's time worthwhile, especially if they're not right in front of you. You can only promise them the moon, stars, and the Brokklyn bridge if things get desparate :)

As for meeting them in person...I dunno about that. Some of these guys are freaks. Hmm, I hope they didn't hear that...

Thx again for the advice :)

#3 My business partner and I learned to develop games in a large corporate team setting. Later, Corporate reshuffling gave a couple of us the opportunity to work out of our homes... and though we were able to crank out just as many succesful games "long distance", I really believe that it was the years of one-on-one communication between the principals that made it possible for us to do so..

This was made clear to me a few years later when we first formed our own development company. (Game Refuge Inc.) We initially let everyone work out of their homes because we figured we were doing everone a favor by not forcing them to relocate.
Besides, If we could do it, so can they, right?)

Oops.

After months and months of increasing time spent on memos, paperwork and other annoying, Bureaucratic trappings made necessary by the enormous task of trying to efficiently communicate with a divided "team"... we gave up and moved everone to a single location.

EVERYONE was blown away by the exponential increase in productivity, not to mention FUN, inherent in putting all of your creative eggheads in a single basket.

So while we all still work from home when the creative muse strikes us there...
We've found that working on games seems to work better when the ideas can bounce naturally around an office setting.

#4 I would think that anytime a group starts, if they can it would be best to work together in a centralized location. With time the group can go to working at home, but first the group needs to know each other and know what each others working habits are like, so you aren't sitting a 1000 miles away wandering "does this guy/girl know what they're doing?" I think it is total possible to work out of a centralized location, but with the team starting together would make that team closer to each other, and things would work out better over time.

Anyways I had an Idea and now I'm working with one person who is hundreds of miles away. I don't know how its gonna end up, but I do hope to learn something out of this, for this is my first try at designing a game.

#5 DreamFX currently has 6 members located in Tulsa Oklahoma. We prefer the central location, The only person we know who has any real programing experiance is in denmark so were making due. again i agree when we have meetings its easier to obtain motivation, but at the same time none of us are getting paid so its hard to make room for the project in our busy lives.

#6 One thing I read from an "industry insider" is that even with a centralized location to mix up the office so you have artists sitting next to programmers, not all artists on one side and all programmers on the other.