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 the CTO of Resistor being taken into custody by some friends acting like the ‘KGB agents’.
As the week progressed we knew that we had to build relationships not just with the executive team of our development partners, but with their employees as well. These are the people doing the majority of the work, and it’s important to be friendly with them as well, since they are often working long nights make sure that software is out on time.
After talking with the team for a few days, we decided to show them what and American keg party is like. In Belarus they are no strangers to heavy drinking, but they had never heard of a Keg Stand. We invited the entire company to come.
We ordered a Keg of micro brewed beer from the brewery across the street and decided to have the party right there in the office after working hours.
Once the beer arrived, the team began drinking immediately. It wasn’t long before the drinking competitions started. To our surprise, the CTO, Marc was beating everyone! This was unexpected since there were some big guys trying to slam beers with Marc, but in a way this was his redemption after the fake abduction he endured earlier in the week.
The development had one last shot at redemption to see if they could find someone to beat Marc in the drinking contest. They convinced the PM, Vitaliy, to challenge Marc. This is a pretty big deal because Vitaliy has a reputation for never drinking, he hates it. But with the pride of his company on the line, Vitaliy did not back away from challenging Marc. Here is the video of what happened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRDqtz6NLHc&feature=channel_page
So who won? Leave your comments on this blog post.
So obviously we had quite a rich experience in our trip overseas to meet the development partners, but there was a purpose for all of this.
Relationships are key for productivity and general shared excitement around any development project. If someone does not know who they are working for, its hard to care about the end product.
We achieved our goal, we built working relationships and created memories with people from another country that made the development process for Disciple much easier and increased the communication dramatically.
Tags: game development, mmo development, mmorpg development, offshore outsourcing
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