The UK office has expanded tremendously, but so have the DE office, Austin and the addition of the Derby office. How have things changed from when you started to now as we continue to grow and expand to bring these two games to life?
TL;DRMike Jones explains that rapid growth led to a standardized network package for connecting new studios, which also enabled quick mini-studio setups for events and let the Derby studio begin with minimal upgrades.
Well, I guess when I got here, I was the only one. The company was much smaller. We were just building out the L.A. studio, and shortly after that, we got the U.K. office. In those early days, it was not easy. We didn't have very much. And like I said, it was just me. But of course, there were a lot less people. So we put it around, and sometimes we'd hire some contractors to help out a little bit, but we very quickly grew the team. One of the things that we figured out was that with a company growing this fast, we have to get real with our infrastructure and the hardware, especially where it comes to network connectivity, connecting the studios, firewalls, switches, things of this nature, to really build out a robust network. It didn't take very long for the company to not be very happy about downtimes. So what we started doing was we built a standardized basic package of the minimum gear that you need for a studio to hook in, so that you could make it part of the mesh. And so when other studios started coming online, it was easier then to say, here's your basis, what are your other requirements, we'll add to it. And so Paul was a big help with that, with his experience in network engineering and design. Mike helped a lot, kind of a coordinated effort as everybody came together. But then what that meant was we started establishing these systems. So it really becomes a matter of delivery time, planning the time to get the equipment in. And then another big one is ISPs, especially when you talk about different countries. Sometimes it takes a really long time to establish that fiber network presence. But we usually have everything lined up and pre-programmed, so once we hook in that network, they pretty much come online. And nowadays, with the systems that we have in place that Paul has been talking about a little bit, it's a lot easier than that even. I mean, we even have smaller subset packages. So, this is an extreme example, but you can even set up a CitizenCon as a mini studio. So we'll hook up the security tunnels, we'll hook up all the networks, so that we can deliver the build packages, but also any other kind of normal communication. It really helps the devs that way, so that when they sit down, they can just log in. They don't have to worry about things like VPN clients and this and that. So I guess that gives you kind of an idea of how we do it, at least in overview. Of course, if you let me, I can go into a lot more detail.
Yeah, that crash cart kind of thing that we did, that's what the Derby studio started with. We had come up with this design for one of the public events, where we could just set up anywhere, boom, here's a quick mini studio. And the Derby studio started off pretty much just as a remote mocap shoot, and so we sent it down there. And when they actually leased the space and turned it into a studio, we had very little to do to upgrade it to make it part of the long-term group. It was basically buying an extra infrastructure switch, and that was it.