Backing any team with a similar night shift team can make good use of night time to double team population without expanding office space.

Basically, it's all about creating a second team, hiring members to do the same job as your day team and make them share the same office at different times.

There are quite a lot of things to keep in mind if you want to make it work:

• Team members selection: You want your graveyard shift workers to enjoy it
  
• Money: Night shift can become quite expensive if not managed properly
  
• Office space: There might be some conflicts if you're too greedy
  
• There are a few limitations you have to know as game engine will handle day and night teams as two independent teams.
  
• No more nightly fast-forward (but it doesn't matter as you already have 24/7 security staff, eh?)

First thing would be to create a new team (duh.)

Let's consider this "Dev - Day" team. It's a pretty typical early game dev/design team with a leader and some backup artists. Deadlines are too close, office space is limited, we have to do something for them that doesn't imply 16h workdays - that would be for a different guide.


Let's create a "Dev - Night" team to complement this team. Set its office hours to something between 18:00 - 02:00 and 22:00 - 06:00. A good middle point is 20:00-04:00 as Nightowls hate early morning.


So far, so good. Now for the team members. The most important thing is to filter by "Nightowl" trait so they will not only accept to work long nights for baseline salary but enjoy it!


Finally, set "Dev - Day" office to be shared with "Dev - Night" team:


Night shift is now up and running. Now select a member of "Dev - Day" team and filter to "selected teams" to see all tasks currently assigned to "Dev - Day":


Assign "Dev - Night" to each task listed.


You now have two dev teams working (almost) as one.

Obviously, doubling your teams means doubling salaries. But beware the nasty "night shift bonus" benefit.




It is not unusual for late game companies to have most of the benefits sliders set all the way to the max. With systematic night shift, this can become a serious issue: setting a 50% bonus means you night team will possibly cost way more than expanding your office to set up another day team.

Besides, "Nightowl" trait will make sure your employees won't complain about working graveyard shift. So just set this benefit to 0, it's not worth it.

Don't forget about the extra dirt caused by night workers, requiring you to adjust cleaning staff schedule. Same thing goes for cooks (if you have any canteen).

On the plus side, having rooms full of employees at night somewhat reduces theft risk, making it possible to save some money on insurance, security staff and theft costs.

Let's sum it up. A day is 24h long, work shifts are 8h long... why not set up 3 teams per office? There is one simple reason:

Workers don't like sharing office with other teams and tend to complain about it.

Timings are not absolute: some workers will come up to 1h early, some may leave up to 1h late. If you don't make sure there is a 2h gap between shifts (that is 4h per day) there will be times when both teams will try to use the office at once.

I have yet to check if mood debuff from "trouble concentrating due to sharing office with other team" is worth the trouble, but it does at least prevent these pesky alerts.

There are a few things that don't work as smoothly as they could with this kind of setup.

First, you can't customize workstations for each employee. For example, one classic trick for a dev/arts office is to fit workstations with either calculators or drawing tablets and set owner accordingly. Unfortunately, it is impossible to set co-owners, so forget about micro-managing your mixed teams. Just settle for inbox, they give a decent boost to anyone.

You can set up 3 shifts per office, and I usually do for support teams (with 7h shifts and 1h gaps). But be ready for workers randomly complaining about sharing their office. If you don't mind the alert popups flood, you can even use 8h shifts with no gap. I just can't.

Beware if using project management or setting up publisher deals: planned dev times will be way overestimated as they are based on optimal workers count and stacking penalty. With shifts you can usually complete projects waaaaaay ahead of deadlines, so keep project dev time multiplier to 100%, you'll get something of an effective +120%.

As your employees will be working around the clock, there won't be any "skip to next day" fast forward. But honestly, you should already have overlapping 24/7 security staff anyway.

One nice thing about having multiple teams over the clock is that you can maximize global efficiency. By using multiple smaller teams, you can avoid the "too many devs at once" penalty.

Furthermore, more teams means more leaders to choose from for project management. Same thing goes for designer teams: more lead designers to choose from.

Having people around the clock means no empty office: burglars hate that.

As said in previous section, projects/publishers time estimations will get blatantly overestimated. If you don't account for it, you'll end up with really long beta stages, nuking every little pesky bug in the process.

This works well with short (1-3 month) contracts too: working 24/7 means you can crush bugs until 23:59 to make sure every delivery is "outstanding".