Bight... A Studio Tour from one of our Producers

When I was asked to write up a post for our blog I had no idea what to write about. I didn't want to bore people by blathering on about myself, then I considered talking about my role here as a producer, but thought I must be able to come up with something a little more interesting.

So, after much thought (You'd be surprised at just how much.), I decided that it might be cool to give a little tour of our studio. We really do work in a cool space here at Bight. Prior to moving into this building, the spot we worked in was a pretty generic, grey-walled office space. It was also quite small with everyone, including our CEO and COO in the same room. If we had stayed in that office we probably would have had to start stacking people.

We moved into this space in July of 2008. The building is a turn of the century former warehouse and was once home to the Seaman's Beverages, a local soda pop company. (As an aside, you can still buy Seaman's products here in PEI, they have great flavours and they still use cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup.) Anyway, enough about old-fashioned soda and on with the tour!


Here you see the entryway into Bight. The fancy sign you see had to be specially made so that it would fit in on the heritage building.



Here's our first floor (Actually second floor, but the first floor of the studio, confused yet?) dev room. We try to keep our teams together, so there's a mix of all disciplines. We've got two producers at Bight, one downstairs and one upstairs with each serving as anchors for their teams. I'm the downstairs producer and Daryl Bibby is the upstairs producer.



Here's a picture of our lounge area, which sometimes is used for short team meetings. Pictured is most of our team for our upcoming iPhone game Fleeced! If you look on the left you can see our tower of consoles where we've got everything from an Atari Lynx and a Sega Genesis, right up to the current generation of consoles.


This is our meeting room. As you can see we've got a giant mural on the wall showing off the amazing world map from Puzzlings. Try not to be intimidated by the serious looking guy at the end of the table, that's just James and he's really quite friendly.



Most of the studio is open, but the folks at the top need a little privacy, so here you see the area where there are offices for our CEO, COO, and CTO.



Speaking of our CEO, here he is working away in his office. Hey Stu!







Here are some shots of our upstairs dev room. Once again it's a mix of everyone that makes up the teams. Before we moved in we had some murals painted on the walls to give the place a little more colour and life. The first mural is a cool take on our logo, while the other two are some characters from an earlier iteration of Puzzlings. If you've been following our blog, they should be familiar with them from Tyler's post.



Last, but not least, here are our two designers pitching some new game ideas to Stu. (No, this isn't staged, and no, I'm not telling you what the ideas are.) They're currently sharing space with our art director. It's a fairly empty room right now, with just the three of them, but at the rate we've been growing they're sure not to be alone in there for very long!

That pretty much wraps up the tour. I hope you enjoyed this look at our office and that you're slightly envious of our workspace!

Cheers!

-Josh.
josh.zisserson@bightgames.com