At Easysee, innovation is not just about the final client deliverable but also equally about the technical infrastructure and processes supporting it. Once a month, we pause standard client production for Tooling Day: an intensive, full-(work)day sprint where the studio divides into four focused teams. The objective is straightforward: identify a recurring bottleneck in our daily workflow and build a functional, custom software tool to solve it within 24 hours.
From the morning kick-off, the teams operated proactively. Architecture debates were immediately grounded in real technical needs, moving straight from ideation into implementation. Here is a breakdown of what two of the teams engineered during this sprint:
Team 1: The Content Browser
For our 3D artists and technical designers, locating previously built 3D assets and shaders across old project folders has historically been a friction point, resulting in redundant recreation of existing assets.
- The Solution: This team engineered a centralized Content Browser designed to index, sort, and display assets locally, with planned integration for our internal network server (NAS). Future iterations will introduce automated tagging and metadata filtering, allowing artists to instantly surface and reuse relevant assets when scoping new client projects.
- The Hurdle: Managing high-resolution textures and scalable storage performance across network drives remains the primary technical constraint to solve.
- The Demo: The team successfully showcased a functional local prototype capable of indexing, filtering, and displaying tagged assets instantaneously.
Team 2: Smartphone Test Farm
Deploying and evaluating application builds across target mobile hardware traditionally created delays, as developers had to be physically present at the studio to cable up devices and install updates manually.
- The Solution: A centralized test farm architecture that allows developers to access and operate physical in-office smartphones remotely via a browser-accessible network URL. This eliminates commute-dependent testing, streamlines remote work, and reduces setup friction during rapid iteration phases.
- The Hurdle: Handling hardware diversity across Android versions, iOS ecosystems, and specialized XR headsets. The team aims to structure this as a modular, open-source pipeline with potential for broader future monetization.
- The Demo: The sprint concluded with a live network demonstration where a physical phone located on an office desk was controlled in real time via a browser interface.
Showcase & Takeaways
The day wrapped up with all teams gathering to run live demonstrations. The atmosphere moved naturally from heads-down coding to an active review session where developers tested each other’s prototypes under real conditions. Beyond the tangible software built, Tooling Day reinforces our studio culture: instead of relying on off-the-shelf workarounds, we dedicate focused time to engineering our own solutions. Strengthening our internal pipelines directly translates into faster turnaround times and higher technical reliability for our clients.
