Picture this. You’re a gaming studio that’s reached the final development stage of a new game in a well-loved series. Then, the worst pandemic in 100 years hits the world, and your country has the number one causality rate in the world, essentially sending the entire population into lockdown.
Under these dire circumstances, it’s understandable if your first instinct would be to cancel or indefinitely delay the game’s release. The heroes of our story, the Italian Milestone studio, decided to adapt to the new situation and continue working on the timely launch of MotoGP™20, the latest in their popular game series.
How did they do it? How can a studio make all the critical final touches in the height of a crisis that prevented the majority of the team from sitting in the same space?
Fortunately, Milestone’s head of software development, Gianluca Barbera, was kind enough to have a long talk with us and share all the tips and best practices his team utilized to overcome all odds.
Here are 10 tried-and-true tips Milestone used to release a AAA game during COVID-19 lockdown.
Focus on process
“Working with the normal process was a key to success,” Gianluca told us. Even in this time of crisis, Milestone didn’t change the game roadmap, they simply adapted it to a new situation and, more importantly, prepared a work-from-home process that all developers later followed.
These guidelines were prepared by a team comprised of experts from various units in the company; they were the only ones to come in to the office for an intensive 2-day period, while all other employees were sent home, to ensure optimal social distancing conditions. This elite team brainstormed possible WFH scenarios and issued detailed workflow steps, complete with a list of contacts for solving issues and concerns that may arise. The new workflow focused solely on changing the aspects that required change due to the new remote working conditions while keeping everything that worked intact.
Once the workflow was established, all employees were instructed to follow it. “Even If you have a problem – follow the process, even if this will delay things a bit. Don’t take shortcuts and if something is wrong, go to the right person.”
Avoid Emails when possible
Instead of using emails for collaboration, which can result in late responses and misunderstandings, Milestone used Microsoft Teams to create multiple 10-person “smart working” groups that solved company-wide problems in real-time. Each team had a specific scope, and not less importantly, a moderator who would lead the discussion. Naturally, the moderator is a pro in the respective field of the group.
Make the most out of existing resources
With over 60 programmers and about 100 other devs that use Unreal and have a huge codebase (generating hours of build and asset creation times), Milestone needed a compilation acceleration boost for the code base and shaders, fast. As IncrediBuild customers, they added all of their office resources to the IncrediBuild infrastructure which allowed each machine to become a supercomputer with hundreds of cores that were seamlessly harvested from idle CPUs across their compute network. The result: a dramatic speed boost to time-consuming builds, shader compilations, and other processes. This helped significantly accelerate development times on both Windows and Linux, no matter whether it was for PCs, Playstation, Switch, Xbox One, or Stadia version of MotoGP™20.
