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Covid-19 and KSP 2


Cleperli

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Yeah, but I suppose that developing a game needs an extreme level of cooperation between the developers. I don't think that they will be as productive at home as if they were at the office.

5 minutes ago, MechBFP said:

Unlikely, I imagine they can all work from home if needed.

 

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Online conferences are a thing. File sharing too. Remote desktops. Githubs of sort. Trello? All they'd miss would be face-to-face communication (in today's case potentially dangerous). It's software development, not retail.

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The company that makes GitLab has like a 95% work-from-home roster, full time. Lots of tech companies are moving in that direction too, even before COVID-19. Now, a game is inherently more of a group collaborative effort than some other kinds of software, where you can more easily subdivide it into parts and work independently. But there are also lots more online collaboration tools these days.

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Barring individuals getting ill and being unable to work (which is always a possibilty anyway, current nasty virus or not) I doubt any impact will be noticeable.  As has been said, they will most likely be able to organise working from home if needed, if they haven't already got that facility anyway.  And, yes, being able just turn your chair and have imprompu discussions and look at colleagues' screens can be a real benefit, but not a huge deal if you can't.

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The impact should be minimal unless the dev team is composed entirely of 80-year-old smoking diabetics with heart disease.

Productivity will take a short-term hit due to lack of face-to-face meetings and some people are simply unproductive working from home, but I would anticipate less than a week of overall development lost.

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1 hour ago, mattinoz said:

I thought your average developer type hated co-operation and would take any excuse offered to go to their cave and write code without disruption. 

That's mostly junior level devs who think they know everything. The senior levels who hate working with people go find or create a startup where they can build whatever they want by themselves. Most of us eventually come to understand that everyone has their specific strengths and weaknesses, and a certain amount of collaboration is a good thing. And like I said before, games are generally more "tightly bound" systems than other software, meaning that each part depends on the others to a greater degree. When a team of devs can't work together well, the game suffers.

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4 hours ago, Cleperli said:

Yeah, but I suppose that developing a game needs an extreme level of cooperation between the developers. I don't think that they will be as productive at home as if they were at the office.

If they're anything like the programmers I know they do web meetings from their desks whenever they can anyway. I'd rather send a chat message to the guy sitting next to me than talk to him. When I talk to him, I don't have a record of what we said to refer to later.

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10 hours ago, Cleperli said:

ah, but I suppose that developing a game needs an extreme level of cooperation between the developers. I don't think that they will be as productive at home as if they were at the office.

Depends on the company culture. It's totally possible to cooperate extremely closely while telecommuting. I do it all the time, in fact I'm in a different country than most of my colleagues.

It does need a company culture where everybody knows how it works, as well as infrastructure to support it. The good news is that collaborative software development infrastructure already has a lot of it built in, and a lot of it is generally available. We use the Atlassian tool set (Bitbucket, Confluence, Jira, Bamboo), Slack for IM, and Google Docs and Hangouts for general stuff. 

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Probably not, the internet provides a lot of infrastructure for stuff like this to the point that you don't necessarily need to be in the same place to communicate ideas and actually perform a job. You got pretty much everything you need at your fingertips. Look at me, I haven't be outside my home or had contact with another person in 8 years :D!

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19 hours ago, Dirkidirk said:

Wrong, this is the biggest issue that can be caused by Covid-19, I NEED MY GAME!

I don't know about that.  I didn't lose any sleep over the NBA cancelling stuff, but then I saw that Formula 1 cancelled the Aussie Grand Prix and thought "OMG, they need to find a vaccine ASAP!!!!!"

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