Hello and welcome to the Spacetime Studios’ Founder’s blog! Cinco, Jake, Anthony and I will periodically be writing articles about some of the issues that surround running an independent development studio. I’m going to spend this time talking about our corporate culture.

When we founded the company, the first thing we did was try to decide what kind of place we wanted Spacetime Studios to be. We believe that having a solid life outside of work is critical to being highly functional inside of work, so we created a series of principles that we stand by:

• We will hire the best: We are extremely proud of our team. There is amazing talent here, both old and new. We actively scour the globe in search of people, and spend a significant amount of energy on our recruiting. We hire from within and without the industry, because all Talent is good Talent.
• Employees will grow with the company: The foundation of any great company is its people. By the time we are finished with our first game, we want everyone to Level Up. We want to know what everyone’s career goals are, then guide and empower them to achieve this.
• We will strive for a family-oriented culture: Many of us are at a stage in our lives when we are starting or raising families. Even though we are a small developer, we offer the same quality of insurance and benefits that large developers’ do. We provide a fully stocked kitchen to all employees. There are frequently kids running around the office. We have found that six-year-olds can actually offer some pretty good feedback on the game
• Everyone will have a clear sense of structure and hierarchy: Everyone must know where they fit within the organization and what their responsibilities are. Our goal is to minimize managerial bottlenecks by providing delegation and empowerment within our departments.
• Communication will flow in all directions: Not just back and forth between departments, but up and down throughout the organization. People need to feel comfortable about what is going on, from the implementation of particular systems to the status of our relationship with the Publisher. Information flows like water here.
• We will utilize formal development methodologies: Anthony’s group is going to dedicate some blogging time to this in the future, but the basic gist is this: MMO’s are monumental efforts. Traditional software development methodologies can and must be applied to this effort while still allowing for the massive iterations that make for a fun game.
• There Will Be No Crunching: Crunching is a fundamental management failure. It is completely unfair to ask our people to give up significant portions of their lives if the management group does not do its job properly. There will never be a “work harder just because” philosophy. All we ask is for our people take care of their tasks and be available for collaboration during core hours. This is a Job, but it is only a subset of people’s Lives.
• We will have an open and collaborative relationship with our Publisher. We listen to what our publisher says. We brought QA in at the very start of our project and they have been with us every step of the way. We provide realistic projections of what we want to do and how long it will take. We have all been involved with a company some time in our past that went naively along the development effort with no real plan of how they were going to get things done. Not us. We will not go blindly into the night (or into Production).

To sum it up, we wanted to have a place where people were involved with their hearts and minds. A place where people could focus on making an amazing product while still managing to live healthy, happy lives. And, much to our surprise and delight, we feel we have achieved just such a thing.

Our studio is not defined by The Game, but rather The Game is a product that will come out of our studio. We began with grand ideas and have applied very specific design, art, technical, and production philosophies to the mix. The majority of the studio has already been through the process of building an MMO (at least once). The ones that have not all bring very specific and critical skills to the team. All this experience and energy is merging together and the results are a blast!

We’ve been playing The Game together since early prototype and, while we can’t tell you any specifics about it yet, I can tell you this: It is already a hell of a lot of fun, and we are still in pre-production. We eat our own dog food here, and it tastes great!

As time goes on, I look forward to us sharing more about the company, technology, processes, tools, and ultimately The Game. Thanks for listening, and keep your eyes to the skies….

• Gary Gattis

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Developer Blogs, Founder's Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.