Farewell and best wishes to Narrative Lead Samantha Webb!

This week we said goodbye to Samantha Webb, who has been on Broken Roads as Narrative Lead for the last 9 months. Samantha has landed a great new role with Ndemic Creations in Bristol, UK, as Game Writer and Comms Lead on Plague Inc and Rebel Inc. We got some final words from Samantha on her time with Drop Bear Bytes and in particular what it was like working with a team who are largely on the opposite side of the world.

First off, what’s it been like as a narrative designer on a remote team?

Samantha: One of the great things about Drop Bear Bytes is our diverse and talented team. Although based in Australia, the studio has people working hard all over the world creating Broken Roads. When I joined the team as the Narrative Lead back in the summer of 2019, it was as a London-based writer, and the then three-person narrative team spanned from the UK to the Netherlands to Australia.

Drop Bear has grown a little since then, with more writers and designers based in Australia, south-east Asia, and Europe. This does a great job in giving us a wide range of voices and experience, but also brings some challenges as to be expected with a globally distributed team.  

Can you describe some of the challenges and how you overcame them?

Samantha: One of the biggest challenges with a distributed team is of course coordinating around our different timezones. Having a weekly call can be tough when it means one or both parties have to dial in at times outside of a normal 9-5. Flexibility is the biggest key here, and when Craig [Ritchie, Game Director], Alexander [Swords, Lead Writer] and I have our calls we’re always open to switching up the time and date. It’s also really important to be flexible when you consider that as well as the distribution problem, some of the people in the studio work part-time and so aren’t available every day. 

Being remote and in a wildly different timezone means that good communication tools are a necessity. There are a huge range of different software out there you can use, and at Drop Bear we use Slack as our primary communication tool. It lets us DM people for 1-1 conversations, as well as the channel features which lets us get information out there to the group when we need to. 

Being in the UK it does feel like I’m often coming late to some conversations, but at least I’m still included in it! We use Google hangouts for our calls, HacknPlan for creative task management and status updates, and a mix of Google docs and Confluence to capture and share information across the team. Get your comms tools sorted and you’ll be in for a far easier time managing a distributed team!

While many of us are in Australia, we do have team members in Europe, North America, China and South Africa as well. What are some of the advantages of a decentralised team?

Samantha: One great thing about a team like this is – if handled well – you don’t have to wait so long for feedback. I’ll often have a call with the team either late at night or first thing in the morning my time, which means I know what my tasks are when I start work. I can commit to working on them, then send them across for review and feedback at the end of my day, knowing that when I start again the next day I’ll have comments ready to go and can kick off where I left.

The downside to this is of course if that communication needs clarification, or if something slips and the work or feedback isn’t done, it can disrupt your work day, especially as a freelancer who might be working with several clients at once. It’s taken a bit of practice, but I’ve become better at communicating what I need in terms of feedback from the team, as well as letting the team know if something I was due to finish up has been delayed for any reason. 

The thing about writing for video games is that it’s often highly collaborative: you need to work with other writers as well as creative directors, designers and artists to build a truly cohesive ludo-narrative experience for players. The key we’ve found is to focus on iterative development with lots of feedback built into the process. The way I’ll often work is to do a slice of ‘stuff’, hand it over to the relevant people, get them to read through and give comments, and / or design an iteration of their own (concept art, or a design concept) to feed into the process. Then we take that and adapt, refine and improve, and go through the process again until we’re all happy with the idea. Taking the lessons learned above, communication and good tooling help us to achieve this. 

Thanks for all this Samantha. Sorry to see you go! Any final thoughts before we sign off?

Samantha: Being a narrative designer on a remote team is something that can work really well, but does need everyone to be fully committed to making it work, and willing to try different things until the right solution is found.  

As Drop Bear Bytes’ narrative and design team carry on expanding both in people and geographies, we can only hope to take the lessons we’ve learned so far and keep getting better as we go. Everyone will keep trying new things, adapting the way people work, and learning from mistakes, not just on the narrative team but the whole studio. Working with a remote team has its challenges, but for us the benefit of having a diverse and talented team is fully worth it! 

Finally, I’ve had a really great time working on Broken Roads – the team here is amazing and as the world and design is growing I get more excited about sharing it with the world! It’s been a pleasure to see the game and the team develop over time and I can’t wait to see how it progresses. Best of luck for the rest of the development!

All of us here wish Samantha the best of luck in the new role and thank her for the time she spent as Narrative Lead on Broken Roads!

- The Drop Bear Bytes team