Building games in two time zones
A little insight into what it’s like building games across the world — from New Zealand to the UK — with two people, zero meetings that should’ve been emails, and just enough chaos to keep it fun.
Every morning (NZ time), I get on a call with Ian. It’s his evening, and we use that time to talk through whatever we’re working on: design problems, bug tests, weird feature requests, and occasionally, song lyrics he’s decided are suddenly relevant to game dev.
We’ve been working together long enough now that we have a rhythm. If it’s visual — that’s me. If it’s technical or code-related — that’s all Ian. We start with the usual: concept docs, whiteboards (FigJam is our go-to), moodboards, post-it scribbles, or sometimes notes scrawled on the back of an envelope. From there, Ian usually gets started on systems using placeholders, and I work on turning those placeholders into something the player actually wants to look at.
Our tools are simple: Microsoft Teams for communication, FigJam for whiteboarding, Google Docs and Sheets for documentation. We’ve used Trello, but honestly? We like flexible structure over rigid processes. Our workflow is organic and collaborative — we have a plan, but we’re not precious about it. If something breaks the plan in a good way, we follow it.
The time zone difference hasn’t really been a problem — if anything, it’s helped. We each get uninterrupted time to focus, and then sync up when our worlds overlap. Ian recently visited NZ, so we got to do most of our whiteboarding for our current project in person, which was amazing.
Chaos.
Ian will randomly break into song, suggest adding 17 penguins, or start playtesting in ways the system was never designed for. I’ll be deep in colour palettes and “vibe control,” constantly tweaking the look and feel of things. One of us will always say, “Don’t be mad but…” followed by the announcement that we broke something important.
And yet, it works.
We’ve found our rhythm in the madness.
The funniest moments always come during testing — hoverboards shooting off into the stratosphere, brooms spinning in endless circles, characters collapsing in ways that should not be physically possible. Bugs are frustrating, sure, but they’re also ridiculously entertaining.
People often ask how we manage game dev across two countries and two time zones, and the truth is: we don’t have a secret.
It just works because we work.
We’re very different people, but we’re both chill, collaborative, and care about making games that feel good — both to play and to build. That’s more than enough.
