In one of my first blog entries in the daily blogging experiment, Thomas asked the following question:

How does Catalyst handle daily communications and work flow as a “vitual” company with no main office?

Great question, with a bit of a complicated answer. I’ll try to nail it down to bullet points:

• When dealing with outside companies [other game companies, distributors, stores, etc], email and the telephone is still the standard.
• For quick day-to-day communications, the core staff all communicates via instant messaging and occasionally quick meetings with iChat or Skype. I actually like the telephone for quick meetings too, as it lets me walk away from my computer for a little while!
• For project tracking, exchanging files [art, layout drafts, book drafts, marketing copy, etc], and internal messaging, we mostly use Basecamp, a web-based system from 37signals. All the staff members and the “core freelancers” are setup on Basecamp. We also use their Campfire chat program for weekly status meetings [each game line gets an individual meeting; they're short, under an hour each, generally]. We’ve actually been experimenting with having the core staff hang around in Campfire all day lately; using it more like an IRC channel as opposed to “single-fire” instant messages.
• For large files [the construction files for full-color books measure in the gigabytes], we have a FTP site to archive stuff; artists also use this site to upload art to us.

That’s the technical end of things … on the “social” end of things, it’s pretty simple. Randall Bills is our head developer, and he’s in charge of wrangling all the game line developers [Peter Taylor for Shadowrun, Rob Boyle for Eclipse Phase, Herb Beas for Classic BattleTech.] to make sure they’re on track with drafts. I’m in charge of keeping the production end moving — making sure that the books I’m working on are getting finished on time, and the same for the layout freelancers working for us. Mike Vaillancourt and Randall Bills currently tag-team on art direction. And of course, David handles the business end of things — dealing with printers, other vendors, distributors, and other industry partners.

That’s it in a nutshell, at least regarding the primary parts of our business! In one of the next entries, I’ll outline one of my “typical” work days.

This entry was posted by AdamJury, on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 21:49:58 and is filed under General. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.