[casual_games] advice for a startup gamedev studio?

[Kenton White]

Hi Ryan,

 

We've just gone through the pains of making our first game and launching our
company, so I'll share my experiences.  Of course we are all unique so many
of what we just went through might not be relevant.

 

Our game was targeted at the Serious Games space, but this may also relevant
for casual games since 1) the target market is not game players and 2) the
game is meant to be played in a half hour or so.

 

We decided on Flash because there was a high concentration of flash
developers in our area.  This was my first experience with Flash and I was
very impressed.  With Action Scrip 2.0 you have a true object oriented
development system.  The drawback is that the data structures are not as
hardened as in Java.  We ended up downloading unsupported data structures
like hashmaps from lord-knows-whose websites.

 

Our team consisted of myself in a product management role, another in the
business development role, and then a designer, writer, artist, and
programmer.  We budgeted 3 months to do the project and in ballooned out
into a 6 month task.  Everyone except the programmer worked part time on the
project.  The programmer worked full time for the first 3 months and then
needed to take on other projects to pay the bills.

 

I can't comment on working with publishers because we self published.
However that experience was very positive and the core team is now working
full time with the company.

 

One thing extra I will add - if you are planning to eventually look for
private equity money for your company, be wary of giving equity to your team
at the early stage as compensation.  If the whole team stays on that is
great.  But if there are large amounts of shares that are held by people no
longer involved with the company this will put future investors off.

 

Instead we gave royalties to our initial team.  This was a wise move since
it made us more attractive to private investors, especially when some
members of the initial team declined to come on board full time.

 

Kenton

 

  _____  

From: casual_games-bounces at igda.org [mailto:casual_games-bounces at igda.org]
On Behalf Of Ryan Sumo
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 6:53 PM
To: casual_games at igda.org
Subject: [casual_games] advice for a startup gamedev studio?

 

I've given it much thought and finally decided that I want to establish a
local gamedev studio here in the Philippines.

 

That was the easy part.  The hard part is, what now?  I have game design
concepts down, and I'm slowly putting together a team, but after that it's a
bit fuzzy.  My basic idea is to make a rather simple game that's complex
enough to be a learning experience for the team, but marketable enough to do
well in the...market.

 

I've already asked someone (thanks Gabriel!) for his thoughts, but I was
also wondering if you veterans out there have any nuggets of wisdom to share
regarding such questions as:

 

What language or software do you think a startup should use these days (ie
C++, Java, Flash)?

 

What's a typical size team for developing one game?

 

What's the usual development time for a game? 

 

How does one approach a publisher for distribution (ie once you've made the
game how do ya sell it)?

 

Those are just the questions I have in my head right now, but if any of you
have advice to give on putting up a gamedev studio, I'd be more than happy
to accept it.  Thanks a lot everyone, and I hope to hear from you soon.

 

Ryan Sumo

(I don't even know what to call the studio.heh.)

  _____  

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