“In my 20 something year career, I’ve never seen two studios working as quickly supporting and evolving a game,” says Kurosaki. “As we transitioned to working from home. I’ve also never seen the sort of the speed and the seamlessness of moving to this work from home. As a writer I’m used to working with my laptop on the weekends and now I have a full $10,000 custom configured workstation that was sent to my house.”
Of course, not everyone has such lucrative backing when it comes to the difficult shift to home working, though Kurosaki says that the team still has the universal challenge of ‘your child coming in and hijacking the Zoom call’.
“It’s always the inherent challenge of not being in the same room as someone. But it has thrown up different challenges that you might not expect,” says Raven’s Associate Creative Director Amos Hodge. “After our playtest feedback sessions usually we all get in a room together and talk about the mode what worked, what didn’t work, what people thought their goals were going to be and how they changed. When you have a 150 player game and then everyone jumps on Slack and tries to talk at once, it takes some sifting through and you can’t have those back and forth conversations with individuals.”
The developers usually playtest their games in cavernous ‘bullpens’ within the studios, with banks of machines to sit at and play. Now, of course, all testing is done online. And while Hodge says that he misses some of the camaraderie that comes with playing with co-workers in the same room, the shift has had the benefit of more closely replicating how the game pays in the wild. “It makes the game a little bit better, more polished,” he says. “It’s a different perspective that is actually helping the game.”
“What’s been really nice about the transition to work from home, is it has forced us to use in game chat, it’s forced us to use a ping system,” adds Kurosaki. “Which is a much better approximation of what it’s like to play this game. If anything, it has motivated us to further develop this ping system, which to me crosses all sort of language barriers”.
