In today's climate, many are being forced to work from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak. As a result, training up new developers and designers can prove to be a challenge.

Altitude Games creative director and co-founder Luna Javier offered advice on training designers from home in her talk 'The Designer's Room: How to Train Game Designers Remotely' at Pocket Gamer Connects Digital.

The company has always worked from home - so all work and training are done remotely. The games industry in the Philippines is still young. Therefore all those hired are graduates – young and inexperienced.

The designer's room

Currently, Altitude uses the designers room. As opposed to all designers having just 10 minutes to present in an hour-long call, two designers get half an hour – 20 minutes to discuss their chosen topic and a 10 minute Q&A.

Various topics can be covered, this allows staff members to teach each other new methods and techniques.

"We found this is the perfect set up," said Javier.

"I didn't want to pressure the designers into coming up with a topic every time." In order to keep the staff from becoming too stressed, each designer is allowed an "off-topic day."

The essential bit of advice Javier had for those wanting to train from home was "first, I would say, figure out the format and the tools."

PG Connects Digital #1 is the best of our Pocket Gamer Connects conference in an online form, with an entire week of talks, meetings, and pitch events taking place from April 6th to the 10th. You can read up on all the tracks taking place through the week here.