Async decisions across six time zones

Bluegill Games has 58 people and an office in Pittsburgh that about nine of them use. The rest are spread across every US time zone there is: two artists in Honolulu, a producer in Anchorage, engineers in Boise and Denver, a sound designer in Chicago and most of the design team on the East Coast. On a normal Tuesday, there is no hour when everyone is at a desk.

“We used to pretend there was,” says Luis Ortega, who founded the studio in 2019. “We had a 1:00 PM Eastern standup. That is 7:00 AM in Honolulu. Our best artists were showing up to it in the dark, half awake, to say they had nothing to report.”

The meeting that decided nothing

The standup was not the real problem. The real problem was where decisions happened. A level designer would raise a question in the morning, Eastern time. By the time the West Coast logged on, the thread had sixty replies and no conclusion. The people in Alaska and Hawaii found it at the end of the day, after the conversation was over, and either reopened it or quietly lived with an answer they disagreed with.

Luis counted once. In one month, the studio had made 41 decisions that touched more than one team. Eleven had been re-decided within three weeks, almost always because someone in a later time zone had not been in the room.

Three rules

When Bluegill moved its design docs into Quill in early 2026, Luis wrote three rules on the first page of the handbook. They are still there, verified last month.

1. Every cross-team question is a discussion on the page it affects. Not a chat message, not a call. The page is where the decision will live, so the argument goes there too.
2. Every discussion stays open for at least one full day. Quill’s default close date is three working days; Bluegill set the minimum to one, so the last time zone always gets a turn.
3. Whoever opened it closes it. In writing, with the decision and the reason, even when the decision is “no change.”

What a day looks like now

A level designer in Raleigh opens a discussion at 9:30 AM ET on the boss-fight page: should the second phase lose its timer? The engineer in Denver answers at 9:10 AM MT with the performance numbers. The artist in Honolulu reads it over coffee at 8:00 AM HT and adds the one thing nobody else knew, that the timer is what the new animation hangs on. By the next morning in Raleigh, the designer has every view on one page, and closes it with a decision that holds.

Nobody was in a meeting. Nobody was up early or late. Each reply carries the writer’s local time, so everyone can see the conversation moving west with the sun.

The time zones used to be the thing we apologized for. Now they are why every decision has had a night’s sleep on it.

The numbers, six months on

• The 1:00 PM ET standup is gone; a written update on Monday replaced it.
• Cross-team decisions re-made within three weeks fell from eleven a month to two.
• The median discussion closes in 26 hours, which Luis considers about right.
• Meetings on the average calendar dropped from nine a week to four.

What did not work

Not everything moved. Playtests are still live, because watching someone play is not something you can do asynchronously. And the first month was noisy: people opened discussions for questions that needed a two-line answer, and the decision log filled up with trivia. The fix was a fourth, unwritten rule. If you can answer it in one message, just answer it.

Luis’s advice to other studios is short: “Pick the page the decision belongs on before you start arguing. Then let the time zones do their job.”