🙁 🎢 🐁 When computer games are your job: the internal device of cloud gaming 🥐 💳 👰🏿

About how game companies work, on Habré wrote more than once or twice. The nuances of the gaming industry are known to many. But few people know about how work is organized in companies from the sphere of cloud gaming. This article will give an idea of the internal kitchen of this industry using the example of the domestic company Playkey. Under the cut, we reveal the nuances of organizing work processes, talk about the principles of selecting and implementing ideas, communication in a team, and the responsibilities of developers. If you have questions, ask in the comments.

What does the company do?

Playkey specializes in cloud gaming and everything related to it. The domestic company is a veteran of cloud gaming, it began even when this area itself was the lot of geeks, and not the mainstream, as it is now. Just in case, it’s worth recalling that cloud gaming is when all the hard work of processing the graphics of the game is performed on a remote server, a ready-made “picture” arrives on the gamer's computer screen. In addition to Playkey, representatives of this niche are Google Stadia, GFN, PlayStation Now.

How many people are on the team and who are they?

Now the team consists of 30 people. These are 10 developers, 3 testers, 2 marketing managers, 1 SMM specialist, 3 system administrators, 2 product managers, plus a finance department, a lawyer and a couple of specialists in other areas.

And yes, there is Belyashik - the permanent mascot of the project team, which by personal example shows how you can enjoy life 100%. He can be called the Mastermind. It's a cat.

From idea to product

The process of making important decisions in Playkey is as follows. It all starts with an idea - a new feature, product, partnership, or something else. Any employee can offer an idea.

In order to be accepted, the idea must be reasoned. Figures and facts are desirable that allow us to prove the validity of the proposal to the team that makes the decisions. It includes the founder of the company, the product owner and a few more people. If the author of the idea managed to convince most of the representatives of this team, then work on implementation begins. In some cases, the life hack “convince the founder” is used - it is difficult to resist his charm and charisma.

A good case study is the implementation of a distributed gaming project. The idea is that owners of powerful gaming PCs, miners, rent out the resources of their machines to other Playkey users. The plus is that dedicated servers are not needed, there is no need for data centers in different regions of the country. When the user wants to play, the system selects nodes, miner computers that are geographically located near the gamer. This allows you to reduce ping and increase the enjoyment of the game.

So, the concept of distributed gaming was proposed by one of the employees in 2017. Then the topic of blockchain and decentralized systems in general became very popular. The idea was voiced and well substantiated. It turned out that distributed gaming makes it possible to reduce the cost of renting stationary servers, as well as increase the number of users - gamers from various regions, and not just those locations near which there are Playkey servers, would become customers.

As a result, it was decided to begin implementation. The development of the hypothesis took a long time, the creation of technology is also not a quick matter. A year and a half has passed from the moment the first idea appeared to the test implementation, and now the project is preparing to go into open beta testing in March 2020.

From development to testing

As in any IT company, testers play an important role, all of them are good programmers. Each of them can write code and disassemble, analyze someone else's. They are mainly engaged in functional testing and the development of automatic tests. It is impossible to verify everything manually, and a person, even if he is a super professional, makes mistakes from time to time. Therefore, whenever possible, automation is introduced, unit tests, integration tests, etc. are run.

True, “hard skills” are not enough. Practice has shown that the company somehow does not really take root in those who are not fond of games. Actually, all team members deal with games, but developers and testers are more than others. It is clear that if you do not like games, it will be difficult to work in such a niche. This is the case when work is fun.

Product and project management

Products are universal soldiers. They develop a strategy, understand how the product should work, look and what impression to make on the user. And in the case of Playkey, they also perform the functions of analysts and project managers.

Playkey is presented on the market not only as an independent product, but also as an additional service from partners, for example, from telecom operators (say, TTK). Playkey is offered to the operator’s customers as a separate service or “bun” as part of the tariff. With this scheme of operation, the service is embedded in someone else's eco-system. For normal integration, it is necessary to organize interaction between the company and the partner, coordinate development and testing, coordinate marketing activities. In such cases, the products turn into projects.

Communication of employees and organization of work

The company has two offices - in Perm and Moscow. In addition, there are employees who work remotely. For communication, Slack is used. There is a main chat, and special channels for individual projects and teams. The chat structure is branched and it’s convenient - everyone communicates on the case, and Slack has the opportunity to demonstrate a screen, which is often required on phone calls.

As for the organization of the work process, for about a year and a half a scheme with two product teams was used. The first worked to achieve optimal parameters for the first session and the first purchase. The second - tried to increase the playing time of users, and also was engaged in improving the quality of the gaming session.

Now a different format is used. Everyone has a common project strategy, a common goal. Products are engaged in searching for ideas, setting goals and testing hypotheses leading to goals. For each new “feature”, its own team is assembled with a set of necessary competencies, and after a successful release it is reorganized for the next “feature”.

Directly in development, a combination of Agile and Scrum is used, which has proved to be most effective. The first stage of work is design. And then there are daily cycles. Work meetings are held both in the office and online, but more often in the office, since there are few remote employees. Although, the designer works from Spain.

The life cycle of technical tasks is familiar to anyone familiar with Kanban. The planning cycle is weekly. First, design, then the task is commissioned, a code review is conducted, then testing, preparation for the release and the release itself. All development tasks are divided into client, server and billing. Each team also provides technical support in its area of responsibility.

Jira and Confluence are used as tools for task tracking and knowledge accumulation. Thanks to this bundle, it is easy to trace the fate of each task and find all the necessary information about a particular project component or business process.

Process involvement

In companies where dozens of people work, not everyone understands why and for whom the current work is being done. So it was with Playkey - some of the employees from the product teams saw the general outline of the project and clearly knew what the task was and what it was being done for. The developers wrote their own piece of code and considered the work done. The overall quality of the product suffered, as the developers simply had no idea what the end user would work with.

The situation was corrected by the introduction of weekly team meetings. They began to gather in order to discuss not only the area of work, but the entire project as a whole. Now introduced "pizza rallies", which take place every two weeks, on Fridays. Everyone eats deliciously and at the same time finds out what has been done in two weeks, how a new function or application works, how innovations have affected business performance. Each in the end imagines what his site of work is for and what it can influence or has already influenced. And yes, pizza has greatly increased attendance!

(non) Employee control

As such, there is no control. Only time calculation for solving problems is used, but the goal is not accounting for working time, but an estimate of the timing of the solution. The real term is compared with the planned one, the reasons for the differences are sorted out, and further planning becomes more accurate.

And at what time and where (from an office or a banana plantation in Uruguay) work is carried out - generally in a secondary way. While business tasks are being resolved and the interaction between teams and employees is effective, some additional control is not required. The success of the company is due to the combination of skills, knowledge and relationships of employees, and not their time or geographical location. All freedom and goodness!

When computer games are your job: the internal device of cloud gaming