We're a serious company, promise.
Now that you know what our studio looks like and what our responsibilities are, we are going to take a look at how our work is organized. Like every other job in the world, game development has some aspects that can come as a surprise for those who have never investigated what the process looks like. Don’t worry - we’re not going to bore you with unnecessary technicalities, we’re just scratching the surface today. Let’s talk about how our work is organized, what tools we use and what a typical week looks like.
Our team on the stage of PGA Awards.
EXOR Studios is a small company and we have a very friendly attitude towards each other. This allows us to be incredibly flexible when it comes to working hours. The majority of us come to work Monday to Friday and work 8 hours a day. The hours are flexible, though - you don’t have to come at 8 every day, and if you need to leave early that’s fine too. Our core hours are 11 AM - 4 PM. That’s when all of us are in the office - we can hold meetings at this time and consult each other on our tasks. Every Monday we also hold an office-wide meeting, where we share what we did during the previous week and set our priorities for the next one.
We all work on different things at the same time, according to our specialties and current needs of the project. Sometimes these are ‘safe’ changes, completely unrelated to other parts of the game, but others have the potential to cause the butterfly effect (The Schmetterling means butterfly, after all). One small change in code can break the entire game. If we all worked on the same copy of the program we wouldn’t make much progress at all. That is why we use a software versioning system.
This line is not just gibberish. It tells you what version of the game you're playing. You can tell that there have been 9107 versions of game content and the executables have been compiled 2607 times. And we're not in even in alpha yet!
The way it works is quite simple. The current, up-to-date version of the game is being kept safe on our server. We call it ‘head revision’. Each person downloads a copy of the program to their personal workstation. it becomes their ‘working copy’, where they can make all the changes they want - locally, without affecting the head revision. When the task is complete and the changes have been tested (more or less) we can ‘commit’ our changes - send the changes to the version on the server for everyone to download and use. The previous version is not gone - all the revisions of the project are backed up, so if we want to revert some changes, it is possible even years after the change was made. All our data is safely stored in 3 locations.
Underneath the mess of cables and dust, there is a highly automated system of world domination...
Changes to game code require the executable files to be compiled again. If all the programmers were required to compile all the changes they make to the game on their own machines it would take up a significant amount of time. That is why we have 3 powerful PCs running all the time, which serve as build agents. Their only tasks are compiling the code and running benchmarks. Why do we need 3? Sometimes (quite often, actually) we need to work on several things at once, and having multiple agents reduces the potential bottleneck. That allows us both to build new versions of our executables and run our automated benchmarks. Apart from giving us information on performance, the benchmarks also let us know if the game runs without issues.
Performance of the Riftbreaker over the course of the past year. We're making progress!
All of the things we mentioned today keep the studio operational and assure smooth running all the time. That is it for now. We hope you learned something useful, and if you’d like to know more - go ahead and ask us anything on our Discord - www.discord.gg/exorstudios.
Other social media:
www.facebook.com/exorstudios
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www.mixer.com/exor_studios
www.twitch.tv/exorstudios
www.youtube.com/exorstudios