For Jake – when it comes to communication, how do you facilitate these types of conversations? How do your days look?
TL;DRJake says Austin's time zone overlap with Europe and LA helps him coordinate studios through meetings and pipeline producers, so producers handle communication and developers are free to work.
Jake thinks the Austin studio is best placed. When they start it's nearing the end of the EU day, and then in the middle of their day the LA people show up, they can interact and communicate with the other studios easily. He starts by keeping up with the other studios, then meetings for things like live release, CitizenCon preparation, etc… He can hit up the global pipeline producers so if there's something that needs to go to animation, or if there's an issue with something, he can help make it happen, whether it's doing an email or starting up a Skype chat etc. This morning they're talking about setting up usables, things that AI NPC's use subsumption to go and interact with, and this morning they were running into some animation issues with those. They talked with the people in the UK to find out what can be done to solve it etc… Communication isn't just about the teams in any one studio. Various studios have builds at the beginnings of their day, there's a lot of syncing, and the teams feel very unified even though they're all over the world. Makes it so if they're doing their jobs right, the dev's don't have to be involved in the communication as much, it's the producers that do that so dev's are free to work.