Holed up
Well well, what a year. We’ve been holed up in our home offices working, spread around the world. Sometimes it’s been awesome, and we’ve enjoyed the freedom that our virtual company brings. No 9-5 and no rules, but then… as we strive to ready our game Steal 2 (currently some private testing is finally happening!) we’ve been grinding a little bit, putting in some extra effort, and some amusing conversation popped up in our online office…
The Tech Guy
1:53 PM
i cannot remember when i woke up
1:53 PM
and i have a beard. i look like a homeless wizard
1:54 PM
not sure if this working at home was a good thing
The Artist
1:54 PM
Ha- I haven’t left the flat all week except to walk the dog
1:55 PM
Actually got some sleep last night tho, so don’t feel totally crap as usual
1:56 PM
Was chatting to some old grandma in the park
1:56 PM
First person I’ve chatted to all week
1:57 PM
My friends are now random grandmas walking their dog.. Walked around the park with her!
1:57 PM
I should blog about that….. glamorous side of indie dev
I’m prone to exaggeration, and luckily for me, my home city has an awesome shared office space that I can go and hang out in, so that can feel more like a normal working environment. Personally I really like working at home because I feel relaxed, and happy there. Also, I don’t live alone… my wife won’t be happy with my claims! It just happened to feel quite significant this week, to talk to another person, a very friendly old lady too!
- The Artist
Office Space
Before we founded No More Pie, we decided early on to be a 100% virtual company. This was part of our founding philosophy, to be truly free from the ancient Protestant work ethic we all know and seem to love. The cycle of 9-5, Mon-Fri is not for us- we don’t even have set working hours, or even a specific time zone. We are free to live anywhere in the world, work anytime we like- when we feel at our best. We don’t even have to stay in one place. Our founders and team members live that dream (nightmare?) every day. All we need is a working internet connection, and a laptop (both sometimes harder to find than you’d think). To be truly creative we feel people need to be happy and relaxed- what better place than ANY place? As I recently explained to some traditional business school people (they wanted to know what it’s like to be a “creative”) you can’t just buy some beanbags and BOOM you have a “creative” company atmosphere… it has to go deeper than that. 
So prompted this week by Dr Green sending a snapshot of his office view in Thailand (see above, yes REALLY!), I thought I’d knock up a quick montage of a few offices that NMP team members have used so far this year. Some are home offices, some are schools, we even tried renting a shared space for a few months- but it wasn’t right for us.
There are more- but I had these at hand. The list of nations “occupied” in 2012 include various locations in Finland, USA, Vietnam, United Kingdom, Germany, and France! I’ve also made sure you can “photo reply” to this particular post, so feel free to send us your own workspace images!
UK branch report
Hello there pie-deniers… it’s The Artist here, in residence at my third office location of the year. We at No More Pie started out with an intention for our company to operate from anywhere anytime (with decent internet connection) and for July I’m going to be based in rainy Great Britain. The interesting thing about that is it means a decidedly average internet connection- with a monthly data limit of 10Gb! Can you believe that? Some of our team enjoy way more freedom- such as our Berlin based agent, who makes do with 100Mbit and unlimited data…
So- what am I doing and how are things in general at NMP you ask? Well, we’ve been up to our necks in the game- some deep re-written code of the game, and some massive discussions (arguments, some might say) about our game! We’re very keen to make the right core design decisions, and create something fun to show the world. I’m taking the opportunity this month to make an official NMP appearance at the Develop Conference in Brighton next week. If any of you are there, be sure to contact me (on our twitter) so you can find out just how handsome I am in person…. haha not really, instead you might have a chance to see the current build of our game, so you can give us valuable feedback perhaps? My main tasks for the past few months have been to help our team of awesome interns to create content for this project, we really don’t know what we’d do without the students of this world and we have some fantastic people working for No More Pie. Let’s all have a cheer for them! Enjoy your summer job, if you are also a student.
The weather here in Britain is not looking so great right now- very wet- but we’d all like to wish you a happy summer holiday wherever you are in the world! You might see a few pics that I post here from my travels during July, or of course any exciting news that happens.
