Hassan Kamran

So a typical day is basically: get in. If I've not got a phone call saying something's broken before I get in, go through tickets, make sure anything that's a blocker or critical gets completed. Get that done first. Just making sure the other guys in my team have things to do and basically making sure they're doing a good job.

Day to day, I get in, check to see if anything's alerting, and then go through the calendar, what's coming up for the day. Sometimes I'll have a call with Hassan to kind of sync up with what's going on in Europe. I still do quite a bit of the network engineering, so running maintenance on our Perforce servers and that kind of stuff as well.

You said alerting. What kind of alerts are we talking about?

Usually it's disk full alerts. The amount of data that we consume is just ridiculous. And so we're constantly adding storage to servers because it just grows so quickly.

Here in L.A., we're pretty much downstream from everybody else, because Germany pretty much starts off the day and they get a full work day, and then the U.K., and they're almost done with their day, and Austin's pretty much in the middle of their day. So we try to pick up on a lot of the tasks that they've already started or they need us to do, and then we kind of close out the evening. So sometimes some of our work comes down as we're trying to reorganize and reorient for Germany to pick up the next day. So we're helping the artist teams and the engineering teams basically be ready to hand off all their materials and the projects they're working on to Germany and start the day over. And what people don't understand is that CIG is a 24-hour outfit. I mean, everybody in this room is pretty much on call 24-7. So if something happens, if it's something we can do remote, we do it from there. And if not, then we have to drive into the office and do it. And then outside of that, the one unique group that we house here is pretty much GVP and the narrative and, like this show. So we try to give Jared additional support if he needs it, and also the GVP team that runs a lot of the other content that's coming up. So a lot of times, what these guys need finished up, we try to finish it for them for the next day.

I sometimes ask myself the same question. How do I manage it? But no, I guess, as you know, the staff here are very capable of self-managing. But with 250-odd people, it does come down to the wire with managing or trying to fix different problems at the same time for 250-odd people. But the team is growing. We're up to three people in the UK, in the Wilmslow studio, and we've got two, or one and a half, in the Frankfurt studio, and we're ever expanding. But yeah, as things develop more and people ask for more requests, I'm asking for more information. Yeah, it's coming to the point... I've got white hair now. I thought I wouldn't get any white hair. I'd go on to grey, but my hair's going white. It's good fun, don't get me wrong, and that pressure and that challenge keeps the fire alight.

To toot Hassan's horn for him, that studio has really had explosive growth in the last year, year and a half. And it kind of caught us by surprise. Up until last week, Hassan was supporting that whole studio with just him and our other IT guy there, Kyle. It's difficult to describe the workload that they have had to deal with, but we've gotten an extra help desk guy in there, Nathan, and we've got two more slots open out there to try to get him a lot more support, because 250 people for three support staff is quite a bit.

And the thing is, it's ever growing as well.

Like you said, L.A. with GVP. I think the U.K. is just purely a development studio, where we've got a team of artists, a team of programmers, just concentrating on developing the game most of the time. Whereas Austin is the backend; they deal with the build system and whatnot. So basically the whole infrastructure starts from Austin. And uniquely, the UK studio is the one where we've got the most developers developing the games.

Yeah, we started off with each studio kind of having its own niche, where LA was video, Austin was core operations, and DE was mainly game engine and internals, and UK was mainly art and some design and some programming. But just the scale of the UK office now, I mean, they do everything there. Mocap was the other thing that was mainly UK. But yeah, that's not so much the case anymore, where each studio has people in every discipline of the game-making process. But I would say just the fact that most of the tech comes out of Austin, where we've got the build system, we've got our source control system, all of that's housed here in Austin.