How can a dev company run without an physical office?

[Tybobobo]

I am trying to wrap my brain (what I have left of it; final year of college exams are straining...) around the concept of running a dev company (such as Frictional games) without an office.

I understand Skype to be the most important tool in communicating (written in one of the dev blogs a year or two ago), but I am having trouble figuring out how a company can make it work - other than just throwing trust blindly into new recruits.

I have recently been working with a few individuals on a few different (albeit school related) projects, and notice ups and downs in communication and work methodology- and I am always looking into improving it - allowing better teamwork and communication!
Thus I am looking into Frictional Games as an outstanding example of online collaboration in a real "work" environment. While examples does not have to come directly from FG, any advice dealing with this would be very helpful.

A few questions on the top of my head are;
How would you recruit new employees? How do you know if they actually "showing up" for work, and working? Would it result into trust issues by only having to work online? What would you require of every dev on working days? Surely a chain leash and webcam pointed at them at all times would not be required, haha


Any thoughts?

[Filizitas]

There re tools for communication out there that just need a host.

Hipchat
Mybb (with a chat)
Trello

And u can use a GitHub for small data transfers
Or u just setup a gitlab on your own host with unlimited space


And one thing is realy important: You dont ever trust people who can easily vanish with all your files.
Search for people wich you can meet as real person, like where you life.
Trust is a hard thing, but it can be easy if you just stick to straight rules.
But as a lead you always have to make the first step in trust. And that is the Coinflip.

FG people as far as i know are all coming from sweden or near, they all met. So you would start with that.

[Tybobobo]

There re tools for communication out there that just need a host.

Hipchat
Mybb (with a chat)
Trello

And u can use a GitHub for small data transfers
Or u just setup a gitlab on your own host with unlimited space


And one thing is realy important: You dont ever trust people who can easily vanish with all your files.
Search for people wich you can meet as real person, like where you life.
Trust is a hard thing, but it can be easy if you just stick to straight rules.
But as a lead you always have to make the first step in trust. And that is the Coinflip.

FG people as far as i know are all coming from sweden or near, they all met. So you would start with that.

Yeah, I agree about the trust issue. I figure that in the beginning, people making sound & artwork wont need access to data, so outsourcing those assets shouldn't be too difficult I hope.

For small projects, I find Trello to be great - as long as everyone is using it. Although being available for skype, etc. are equally important as there might be issues or questions that you can't really get clear answers from by reading a trello post. At least you can get answers faster.

Good advice, thanks

Checked out "MyBB" and wonders what you mean "with a chat". Are you talking about shoutbox plugins?