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.

Production report = The boring post

Production report!
To all those of you out there waiting on more art and animation (or even code... argh) today is a sad day. Well for most of you anyway, there is always that one person that loves to hear production reports. So this post... is for you... with all our love (xoxo)

Weekly meetings = Boring stuff

One of the most important things we do every week is the weekly meeting.
We gather all the team in one place and discuss the work that was done last week, and the work we will be doing on the next. Kind of like a cult, except we make videogames instead of killing ourselves.

These meetings usually start at 10am and can stretch for an hour or two. Not everyone stays until the end. Normally it starts with everyone discussing general problems and then smaller and smaller groups to discuss specific problems related to code, design, art etc.
Usually whenever we start discussing code, somebody falls asleep. We can't blame them, really.
Code is boring. That's why everyone leaves and goes back to work.

A typical meeting at Nerd Monkey's office. In the photo, Diogo and Francisco discuss design.

Also, at the start of each month, the entire team plays the latest build and gives feedback on everything. Even if everyone has played the build lately, it is always important to voice everyone's opinion as most of the times, some new idea or solution pops up from the most unexpected team member.
Except for Diogo. Nobody likes ideas from Diogo.

Organizing production = More boring stuff

The start of the week also signals the start of a sprint. We do weekly sprints and keep everything tied to these tiny focused loops of work. For keeping track of current and upcoming sprints, tasks, objectives, milestones and everything else we use Altassian Jira.

Old Jira promotional screenshot. What? You thought we would take a screenshot of our own work?

Up until recently we were using Gitlab on our own server. But due to the growing team and the need for a more dedicated tracking, we decided to jump to Jira. The IT guy wanted to kill us when Filipe told him we were done with Gitlab and all that work implementing it in our server would be thrown out. Oh well. We hope he learned his lesson. Also, our budget just increased! Cool.
Yeah, he should have studied something else. Back to school with you, boy!

Jira is an interesting piece of software. It can be used online or downloaded to be placed on our server (we won't be doing that, now. Obviously). Currently there is a free version with a 10 person limit which is perfect for most indie teams. It allows for connection and sharing with other tools like Slack, Google Drive, Confluence, Trello, and many others.
NO, it does not connect with Microsoft Messenger, MOM. Jesus!

We are also currently placing all our bugs there, but when we get to Beta we will probably move that to a more dedicated platform for bug reporting.

We continue to use Gitlab for many other things including our own dedicated Wiki.
And our wiki contains a big outline of... Out of Line... hehehe. Yes.

Files and online meetings = Even more boring stuff

We are always all online in Hangouts. Even though the entire team works in a physical office, this way if someone was out for one day of work or decided to stay home to work from there, can keep track of any important announcements. Also: memes.

For overall trips, vacations, days off or any other events, we use Google Calendar. This tool is very useful as it can be easily implemented on your phone (Android or iPhone but not Windows Phone) and synced to notify you of upcoming events. We can also all see at a glance the most important milestones without having to login to Jira or Gitlab.

Alongside the company Google Suite (nerdmonkeys.pt) we also make extensive use of Google Drive, mainly Sheets, Docs and Slides for all our documentation. We usually write in English to make sure that anyone on the team can read them. They are also usually very useful for pitches, presentations and any other occasions.

Yeap, another promotional screenshot. Easy to tell by the Cortana search still on in the lower left corner.

Production Repor-BOOOORRRRRRIIIIINNNNGGGG!

Finally the production report. Every month an email is written where a breakdown of the production with all its achievements, decisions and on-going production is det-BOORRRIIIINNNNGG!

ARGH! - sigh - Well, that's it, I can't take much more of this anymore.

We are done here.

Hope that one person that we love so much actually liked reading this blog post. Next time we will be going back into the things that matter like art, animation, music and such... except for code.

Catch us on Twitter!
Don't panic, flight mechanic!