How much of the work you split up between the different studios can really be done separate and how much of it requires multiple studios to work together on one single aspect of the game? How do you manage to sync the work done by the different studios that are probably also in different time zones?asked by Acaro

This is a really good question, and actually one of our biggest challenges. So, when we're deciding what work needs to be done for something, take Gamescom for example, we try to divvy up work in a way that makes sense. We're not going to have an artist and a designer for the same ship working in tandem while one's in the UK and one's here, because it just, they can't communicate, they can't have that back-and-forth.

Logistically, it's impossible.

They don't necessarily know the status of everything, and it takes 8 hours to find out the answers to basic questions that might be blocking you. So, we really try and be smart about when we're breaking up the work. There were a lot of ships... again for example Gamescom, UK did a lot of the large world tech, and a lot of the infrastructure for what you saw at the demo, and they had been working on some of the art for a lot of the ships, and they have the bandwidth of course, and the talent, to have done a great job with the tech setup and everything for the ships, but since we knew they needed to work on it, they just handed all of the ships off at a certain part, when the art was done, for us to do tech setup. Because that's a very clean breaking point. There are parts in the ship pipeline where everything is intertwined and things are just coming in everywhere, but that actually, when they handed things off was a very clean breaking point to give to us, and we had all of the context just from looking at the files to finish everything up. It made sense for us to take on those ships because we would have everyone locally working on these essentially mini-features, and they could all focus on what they were going to need to interact with the most, between each other.

On the flip side of that, there's a lot of times where there is a lot of international collaborations. Steven Humphreys, from the UK office, is one of our engineers, and what happened, he would work on part of this GOST system, and every day the design and engineering team would have a series of handoff emails where we would send an email at the end of our day to the UK office on what's in progress, how much progress has been done, what's been completed, what bugs have been fixed, and so then the UK would use that as a point of departure for what they needed to continue off of, or what they've started, at the end of their day, they send us another handoff email, and that gives us an idea of what they did. So with GOST, whatever Stephen Humphreys had worked on, whatever he'd finished after that, the email would reach us, and then Kirk, Dan, Mark Abent, would then pick up from there, so they would get the emails for what stuff on GOST had been completed, and they'd be able to run with the ball until the end of our day. So, there is a lot of international collaboration, it just depends entirely on what that feature is. Some of it doesn't require collaboration at all.

And while it makes sense with the time too, we also just to piggyback on that, that was a really good point, we have our CG supervisor, Forrest, who's been really championing us getting more detail into our bug tickets and our database, and that way you can not only go to someone and look them up and say, this is what they're working on, but you can go in there and you can see what sub parts of it are finished and what aren't, how many hours is the task going to be, how many they've logged so far, and this is completely invaluable between studios when you want to see how things are progressing and when you can task your developers appropriately.

Ideally, through JIRA, whenever a developer leaves a comment on what work they did, if another developer opened up that ticket or that task, they'd just see everything, read that comment, they should be able to pick up where the last one left off.