Remotely working

Working remotely or remotely working?

As the international crisis of the corona virus pandemic takes over the world, we at Nerd Monkeys here in Lisbon, Portugal decided to start our quarantine 1 week ahead of the government imposed one. It seemed obvious that this was the correct course of action as many other companies were already taking the same steps.

So, since the 16th of March, everyone has been officially working from home.
For some team members this is a brand new experience, while for others it is something that has been part of their lives for some years now.

Diogo is obviously pretending to work. You can see in his glasses the cubes from Minecraft reflected.
Also, he is working on the laptop while holding a coffee mug. At least he could have disguised it a little bit better.

 

Francisco is a bit smarter. He decided to take a photo showing his computer screens with Unity and some artwork assets. You would be almost fooled to think he was actually working but then you notice it. Right there. In the left corner. A Nintendo Switch! ahAH! You can't fool us Mr. Santos!

Genebra is a programmer and because of that he thinks he can outsmart everyone else due

to his (supposedly) more logical thinking. Well Mr. Spock, you can't fool us!

If you look closely to his fingers of his left hand, you can perfectly see he is using WASD in conjunction

with the mouse on his right hand! HE IS PLAYING AN FPS GAME!

You see Mr Watson, he thought his Photoshop skills were just perfect enough

to hide the images on his screens, but he forgot to hide the most obvious piece of evidence... HIMSELF!

Filipe doesn't even hide it. Here he is "producing"... with a Nintendo Switch in his hands.

At least he is honest about it even if the photo was taken by surprise by his wife.

Wilson's face says it all.
Nobody believes you dude.
We know you were playing videogames last week.

Mafalda said she didn't want to take a photo.
So we asked her dog to sneak one for us.
Here she is playing in her iPad instead of working.
She has no idea her photo will be on this blog.
Thanks pooch! Woof!

Inês Pereira is our new intern!
We can definitely with all certainty say she is indeed working!
It would be rude to assume differently anyway, so here is a "short" introduction written by her.

"Hello, I'm Inês and I'm from Almada. I've always been pretty sure I wanted to do something related to animation since I was a kid. I attended high school at António Arroio, where I studied Audiovisual Communication with a focus on Multimedia. From there, I moved out and attended college in Portalegre, and now I have a degree in Design and Multimedia Animation. Yay! Now while Nerd Monkeys is my first experience in the area, I did work retail for a little while (super glad I'm not there anymore, considering what's going on). I only spent four days in the studio before this all went down and we had to start working from home, which does make me a little sad because the learning process and getting feedback does become a little tougher. But hopefully all of this gives me a little more time so that when things eventually return to normal, I'll be going full steam ahead~!"

Boring, just like every other intern.

Anyway, have a nice isolation week!
Take care, teddy bear.

The story so far...

Do you like reading?
More than looking at pictures?
Good.
Here we go.

It all started when Francisco was 6 years old.
As a young and excited boy that he was, Francisco would play videogames for hours on end.
His parents still recall that one time when they thought he was crying because some bully made fun of him on the playground. No. Those were 10 hour long CRT videogame tears. The best kind of tears.
Yes. Because back in the day real men (or boys in this case) would play videogames on Cathodic Ray Tube TVs. You know, the glass box with a huge light bulb inside directly pointed at your eyeballs.

 

If you look closely, you can see the tears in Francisco's eyes (he is the one holding the controller)

Some years passed and Francis, now a young man, decided he would take on his life long dream of creating videogames by enrolling on a videogame course.
He decided to go to the best videogame course in Lisbon* where the best teachers taught. The Videogames and Animation HND course. There he met the greatest videogame developer (and teacher) of all time, Filipe**.
Together with Filipe, he learned that making videogames made him no money whatsoever. After all, why was he there teaching videogames instead of making them?
Money.
Obviously.

Filipe teaching... somewhere... something... in very low res

*We've heard it lost its charm recently
**He paid us to say this

During his tenure at Etic, Fran worked on a concept for a new and interesting videogame.
A platformer game about a little boy escaping from a factory. He would use his spear to construct his own platforms and activate buttons and things.
Helped by the greatest videogame course coordinator of all time***, Ivan, Fran and his colleague Vasco from IST, worked on Out of Line for 3 months so that they could apply to the 2018 PlayStation Awards.

Francisco and Vasco at Etic "studying" videogames

***He also paid us to say this

Amazingly and without anyone expecting it, they won the Portuguese PlayStation Awards!
They won the Best Game and the Press Award. They took home 10.000€, a PS4 dev kit and 50.000€ worth of marketing money,

Francisco and Vasco at the 2018 PlayStation Awards in Lisbon

Obviously, F knew that this was not normal as videogames normally don't make any money, so he asked Fil if he and his company Nerd Monkeys could help in organizing and producing the full videogame.
Fil met with Nerd Monkeys co-founder Diogo and Etic coordinator Iv. to discuss if this was a viable proposition.
After pretending for some time that they were not interested and that they didn't need more money or projects, they accepted.

(We searched for a photo of Ivan but couldn't find it. Maybe next time.)

Meanwhile, V. decided to pursue other cool projects and a new programmer was brought in.
João Genebra, or as we like to call him, J. worked on a brand new build and started everything from scratch with F.
After that, F. spent an entire year with F., J. and D. at N.M.working to get O.L. into a reliable V.S.

This is the strangest photo we could find of the team working

Nevermind, maybe this one is stranger

Finally and after almost 1,5 years of developing, showing, pitching and producing the team managed to get a deal with a publisher to get the game out the door.

But since we can't talk about the deal, the money or the publisher yet, the "story so far" ends here.
In its due time, we will get back to this and tell you the rest of the story, hopefully after a successful launch.

Until then...
Chop chop lollipop.