The Madrid study reflects the problems added to the inability to go to the office. Weeks of internal restructuring to move forward.
When we talk about the video game industry in Spain and look at what is to come, it is inevitable that the name of Temtem appears immediately. Also if we do it from the independent scene in general. The Madrid study CremaGames, authors of Immortal Redneck, gave the surprise on Kickstarter with more than $ 573,000 in a campaign in which 11,716 people trusted.
About two years have passed since FreeGameTips first chatted with the studio and its project, which does not hide its inspiration in Pokémon, but which seeks to find its own essence, an idiosyncrasy where the MMORPG element will be the one that makes the difference.
After a successful Early Access in early 2020 and the desire to launch the second half of 2021 on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in its final version, that pace of work was not going to be altered under practically any circumstances: everything was going smoothly. However, when a pandemic appears before you without warning, forcing you to activate a remote work protocol for —at least— two months, things change.
And so things are, with a team of 22 people taking Temtem development forward from home while facing all kinds of difficulties. We have interviewed Guillermo Andrades, Game Director at CremaGames, to tell us how things are going; to speak to us about this new reality to which they have had to get used without alternative, a slow process full of uncertainties, unwanted coincidences and the need for coordination where communication is essential.
On the occasion of the early access, Crema published an opening anime series of Temtem
FreeGameTips: How did you start the process of adapting to remote work and leaving the office temporarily?
Guillermo Andrades: We started, if I remember correctly, on March 9; a few days before the alarm status was decreed. That day, as things were starting to get a little sketchy, we began to tell people that they wanted them to start working from home. For example, those who came in public contact or who had more contact with other people; In the office there was nobody with symptoms or anything, but … I don't know, if you come to the Metro with more than a hundred people … it was dangerous.
So, during the week of March 9 we did optional work: whoever wanted, telework; Who didn't, of their own free will go to the office. It was that weekend when we decided that, from the 16th, teleworking became mandatory. And this is how we have been working so far, basically. In our case it was not a very serious process because we were already more or less prepared. Although we did not telework before, the key pieces of equipment were ready to work from home: office VPNs, computers, servers, and more. Everything was more or less ready; not at the company-wide level, but some of us do.
How have these seven weeks been? Have you encountered difficulties with this new methodology?
Yes at two (laughs). There were 22 people in the office. There is difficulty because each person in your home has an uncontrolled environment. When a new person arrives at the project in the office, we install a PC from scratch, with all the necessary programs; We leave everything 100% ready for you. Being teleworking, we cannot do all this and we depend on the person in question to do it. So even though we had instructions, there have been people with problems; Or there are those who had outdated hardware and the project did not work as well for them. It is not the same in the office, where everyone has powerful computers, SSD memory and NVMe hard drives, to which they have old hard drives at home, because programs like Unity take up to five times more to open.
Yes, it is affecting in terms of problems and time. All organizational issues are more complicated. In our case, that we are still a small company and that we depend a lot on working together for that reason of saying: I get up, I go to your table, we work together and we move forward … That kind of thing, right now, is being greatly delayed; even if there are video calls and screen sharing, etc. It is not the same, more time is wasted. What is fitting is not being a dramatic process either.
Teams like Tequila Works claim to have been adopted perfectly. They are about ninety people spread across five countries, but the process has been satisfactory, they told us.
I believe that the case of Tequila changes a lot. They are a much bigger studio and, since they have many people spread out at different times, they have everything already well established; It is not the usual day to day exactly, but almost. In our case we were always all together at the same hours, always everyone in the office except for specific cases … We had never had anyone working from outside, we were like a platoon. I understand, therefore, that they have not noticed the difference as much as we do because in our case we have had to change everything, it has not been an isolated case.
Any particular problems you especially remember during those weeks of coronavirus exceptionality?
Problems … many. From a person whose PC broke, for example, to whom we had to buy a new one and send it to his house; People who live with roommates and have Wi-Fi that is nothing out of the ordinary, so it takes much longer than they should to move forward with a project … That kind of thing. Also, at the daily work level there are many tasks in which there are departments that are united, such as programming, art, the technical part, the lighting parts of the world … Normally, they are done with a PC looking up to three people at a time . Now that is much more complicated. Another thing that is not usually talked about and that is important in video games is the calibration of the screens and the lighting. In the office we have a section that you put on the screen and it measures the configuration, the optimal colors … All the screens in the office are "synchronized" and, right now, that doesn't happen. Maybe in my house you see something good but then another artist takes it and says that those colors are not correct.
Temtem | Cream Games
Has all of this altered your plan for content updates, scheduling or the roadmap in general?
Yes, it has altered it, yes. Not much, either, but maybe two or three weeks. The longer this goes on, the more everything will be delayed. In the end, every week makes us lose half a day, for example. It is affecting us in times.
With the new de-escalation plan presented by the Government of Spain, are you already preparing a return to regular face-to-face work?
We haven't talked about it yet. On the one hand, although it is affecting us and we would rather be in the office, employee safety comes first. Until we see that the situation is safe for everyone, we will not return to the office. For our part, if we have to delay absolutely everything one or several months, we prefer that if everyone is going to be healthy.
Let's talk about the economic impact. Is it being great or is it not being noticed a lot in your company?
Under normal conditions we should not have accused him, but in our case, because something has happened to us that, by chance, just before all this began, we had hired a new office to move to Madrid. The team is growing and we no longer all fit in the current office. So, just when we had signed and started paying for it, we were already talking to interior designers to start doing the renovation work, etc. And of course: everything has frozen. We have been in quarantine all the time in which nothing has been done with that office because everything is obviously stopped, and we are paying the two rents. What was going to be maybe a two month process in preparing the new office and making the move, is now going to be a process of five, six months? We do not know. Even the construction people until recently couldn't go out either. It has coincided like this, we can not do anything … If we had waited another week to sign it, we had not signed it, but already …
Let's move on to Temtem. How are things going after the launch of Early Access? Have you experienced a very large drop in daily active players after the initial boom?
The number of players has been reduced. It is a game where, when it is not finished, when you finish the game there is not much to do for now; But there are still a lot of people waiting for everything we say or do. The truth is that very well, we cannot complain. Above all, because it is in line with what we already had in mind. We were clear that the players were going to fall a lot when a few months passed, which is what is happening. As we get more content we hope that all those people come back.
Considering that Early Access has only been tested on PC, what about the version for consoles (PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch)? Have you been able to start tinkering with the port?
For now we are still on PC. We will surely start with porting in a few months. We don't want to do that right now either; make it at the right time. If we start thinking about it too soon, then we will finally lose a lot of time. Realize that we don't stop putting new things into the game for the PC version. It is best to do so when development is close to completion.
After these months of Early Access, what have you learned from the community? Have any aspects or news appeared that inspired you and that you did not have?
Ugh … Lots of things. The Temtem forum has a suggestion section, there people are turning a lot, there are many ideas from people who have finished the game in one way or another; even already, in the current state. That forum I read every day, I read everything and, although sometimes they do not give you an idea that can work exactly in the game, if it is an idea that makes you think to give it a spin maybe you can enter the game.
To finish, how do you think this return to normal will be for Crema Games? Are you optimistic about it?
I do not know, that's the truth. It is such a rare situation … We have never experienced anything like it. I have no idea. I hope that when things are more stable, a return to work can get along. We continue with great security measures, but I personally see it with optimism. I want to go back to the office, to see people again every day … but I don't know. I don't know when that can come.
For me personally, it is very important to feel the human warmth. When we make a video call with the webcams activated you say: "joer, I see your face after so many days". It gets super weird. I love working in the office, being around people, and being able to interact every day. I miss him a lot.
