This guest post is written by Tobias Batton, the CEO of Resistor Productions located in San Francisco, California, the publisher of Disciple MMORPG. Tobias and his company has been working with MoveYourWeb and Apalon for several years and built a number of successful projects. In this series of guest posts however Tobias addresses the fun aspect of building the big relationship with offshore vendor.

Last week we left off with getting beaten with branches in a 150 degree sauna in Belarus by our development team.

The next story of our adventures in team building center around the Resistor Productions CTO named Marc. Marc is a good friend with the CEO of Resistor, Tobias, and Tobias knew that Marc had never been overseas. With the anxiety of Marc’s first time overseas, along with the weird feeling of visiting a former soviet state, Tobias went to great lengths to take advantage of Marc’s awkward feelings.

Ahead of the trip Tobias called the owners of Apalon and planned a prank that is so epic in proportion that it rivals anything you have ever seen on the show “Punk’d”.

On the second night in Belarus, Tobias left early to go to dinner with some of the employees of the development firm. Marc was left alone with one of the owners late at night in the offices. It was then that a ‘KGB agent’ showed up, accompanied by an armed guard with an AK-47.

They approached Marc and asked him for his passport. They told him he was wanted for questioning under suspicion of espionage. Marc was completely freaked out. The agents barely spoke English, one had an AK-47 and they kept his passport. They were yelling at him in Russian and trying to get him to sign a confession that was written in Russian, so Marc had no idea what it said!.

When Marc refused to sign the confession, they handcuffed him and put a black bag over his head. They lead him outside and threw him in the backseat of an SUV. They drove around for about an hour and yelled at him to shut up anytime he asked any questions.

Marc was silent and shaking.

After about an hour of driving around, they pulled up to a security gate and showed their badges. The guard let them through. All Marc could think is that he wanted to see his wife, and that he thought he was going to be tortured in some crazy interrogation.

As the car made its way down into a parking lot, there were a group of men yelling outside the car. They parked the car and took the bag off of Marc’s head, and standing in front of him was Tobias, half drunk, with an evil smile on his face.

It’s probably not appropriate to write what Marc said to him in this blog, but there was a very colorful exchange. After Marc released some tension, he shared the laugh with Tobias and the developers.

Marc said he completely believed it was real, and wondered if he would die. It was the most epic prank he ever experienced and will remember it to the end of his days.

Tobias Batton,
CEO Resistor Productions LLC

Tags: game development, mmo development, offshore outsourcing
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This guest post is written by Tobias Batton, the CEO of Resistor Productions located in San Francisco, California, the publisher of Disciple MMORPG. Tobias and his company has been working with MoveYourWeb and Apalon for several years and built a number of successful projects. In this series of guest posts however Tobias addresses the fun aspect of building the big relationship with offshore vendor.

As you know Disciple is a browser based - no client download game that is heavily focused on PvP, level progression and rankings. The actual Production time for this game was about 20 months, from concept to release. This is part one of a series of posts about the different aspects of making a browser game. I thought it would be fun to start with some of the more entertaining aspects of game development.

When we started the design process, the majority of what we were doing was fleshing out the actual game concept on paper. This was everything from gameplay, to story and lore, to art style, and even basic combat formulas.

As our concept became defined, we needed to choose developers to implement our ideas from paper to code. There was a lot of discussion on whether or not we would hire our own developers or hire a professional 3rd party developer. Rather than train our own development team, we thought it would make sense to hire a 3rd party with experience and give them direction, rather than creating our own crew from the ground up.

After a little looking around, we discovered a company called Apalon based in Europe. They were both affordable and qualified to handle our project, and had done work for several large companies in the past such as Fisher Price. We knew from the start that there would be a few issues managing a project in Europe, one of which would be team building and general excitement and moral.

We had to keep the development team excited about the project, and we had to make them feel like we were all part of the same team, even if we were an ocean apart. So during the process of development, the management of Resistor took several trips overseas to manage the development and build relationships.

Apalon is based in a country called “Belarus” which is part of the former USSR and one country east of Poland. These countries have become a hotbed for technology, even Google has set up a huge development office in this area.

On our first trip there we did not really know what to expect, but upon arrival the similarities to the USA are truly uncanny. On nearly every corner of the downtown area you see McDonalds and TGI Fridays, as well as other familiar sites.

As soon as we arrived in the office, we were hard at work, but we also knew we had to find ways to become fast friends with our new partners, so that they could feel as though they were a part of our team, and our friends. I asked them to give us a taste of traditional Belarussian culture.

The first night they took me to a Belarussian Sauna. Its very hot. Like 30 seconds now get me the hell out of here right now hot! I didn’t really know what to expect, but it was quite an experience.

I have been in a Sauna in the USA maybe once or twice in my life. The Russian Sauna is much hotter. After 30 seconds the only thing you are thinking is that you want to get the hell out before you pass out from the heat. You touch your hair and it feels like its about to light on fire. The gentlemen I was there with were pouring beer on the coals and laughing.

Peter, the VP of their company, wanted to leave too, but we were trying to be tough and hang in there. Next thing I know, one of the guys walks in with some tree branches and points for me to lay down. My response was:

“what the hell???”

Matvey, the Operations Manager explains that he will hit the branches against my back, and this is tradition in Belarus. All I could think was that I wanted to get our of there right away. Matvey told me I was a Sauna virgin and they were going to “pop my cherry”. Not wanting to look like a wimp, I reluctantly agreed.

Getting hit with the branches didn’t hurt . . . . When i tried to get up, they pushed me back down. It was similar to a college hazing. After 2 minutes or so, I thought I would die, so I insisted on leaving and they let me go. In all it was a great experience, everyone got their turns with the hot room, I was able to take joy in watching them suffer too.

This was just the first night. In my next post we will cover a staged arrest of our CTO by the “KGB” as well as drinking contests and more! Here is a preview video for what we will cover in the next post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRDqtz6NLHc

Tobias Batton,
CEO Resistor Productions LLC

Tags: game development, offshore development company, offshore outsourcing
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After the recent successful launch of Atomic Checkers Iphone Game we do not reject the leads for Iphone game development any more. Previously Iphone Application Development wasn’t our focus because of the lack of expertise and we stepped into this market finally.

For those of you wishing to learn this science too - here is the nice link to the course prepared by Stanford.

Tags: game development, iphone application development, iphone development
Posted in cool links, game development, iphone development | 1 Comment »

As a small announcement: our folks from Game Development department are creating an office building in Second Life, the most popular virtual world out there. This will help our animation folks to have the real track of benefits which organization can achieve by having the presence in virtual world based on the results of using our own office there. Besides that, the main aims that drive the development of the office for our company are the following:

• We would like to give to our customers a visual understanding of our department structuring, roles that people play, their positions: all the office space will be broken down into the rooms simulating the departments that we have at MoveYourWeb;
• Held corporate and client meetings. We practice weekly corporate meetings which all employees attend, which is rather tricky, given the fact that MoveYourWeb has several production offices. We use broadcasting to wall screens but it might be nice to play with virtual world company meetings;
• Attract additional talent. Our HR dpt reports that a small percentage of our local developers have Second Life accounts and spend their time in that virtual world. By opening our presence there we would be the first local IT company to welcome them;
• Seminars. Given that we have several offices it might be convenient to held thematic internal seminars held in Second Life, because employees from different offices can attend.

We expect to deliver early October and that will be deffinetely featured on this blog.

Tags: game development, office in second life, second life
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