Starting a new Game Studio

I'm 42, currently own a business (in the automotive marketplace) and develop games in my spare time.

Game design has always been a passion and I've always dreamed of turning it into a carer.

I'm self taught (have been coding since Amstrad and BBC Micro-B computers and have been using Unity since its beginning) and the prospect of getting a job in the games industry is unrealistic in my view (My full time study days are over). Who would take on a 42 year old self taught programmer? No one.

I think it comes to point in life when you feel: Now or never.....

Start my own game studio full time.

I have some money in the bank, but I would definitely need some sort of funding solution to start my own game studio.

I have a few ideas in mind, mainly targeted towards the mobile platform.

I would certainly need an artist, level designer and coder to help turn things around quickly.

My questions are: What are the best avenues for funding? Freelance or full time staff? If freelance, best place to find them/questions to ask/contracts? I'm I mad to do it... ?

I'd like to hear from people that have taken the step and created their own studio, who could give me valuable advice. Many thanks.

 

Very risky business nowadays to do as a full time job without existing popular products or contacts for freelance jobs. Most of the stores are saturated and hundreds of games are flooded everyday to all platforms. Even if you manage to create something nice and polished you need to invest a lot on marketing to get it noticed. Without contacts you probably would have to try freelancer portals where you would compete with people who will offer to do the job for the half price.

 

If you own a business, wouldn't it be reasonable to divert some of the profits into funding development of a game? It looks like the safest choice in this situation. (However, IIRC, this option might not be available depending on nature of owned business/the way it was registered).

Basically... instead of "starting a studio", slowly hire people to develop parts of the game for you. It'll take a while, but eventually you'll get yourself a product you can publish/sell.

Starting a whole studio right away looks like a recipe for burning through your bank account quickly.

Also...

If you're GOOD, you can get hired and do freelance work. As they say, on the internet no one knows that you're a cat.

 

In your boat I'd:

0. Being older then 25 only matters for adoring media coverage should you become a big success as in you'll get none of that adoring coverage of your precocious genius since you are over 25 and didn't even attend Stanford or an Ivy League school but it doesn't reduce your chances for success.
1. Keep your job until you have bought a library of assets you need.
2. For 3D models since you are employed and can't likely realistically afford to hire artists to do all the art work you should buy Poser Pro 11 and a DAZ Game development license. In the DAZ Store you target models that you can easily alter for your games. Also, Mixamo Fuse and the Adobe Creative Cloud.
3. For 2D you buy Anime Studio Pro and extra content that's to your liking from the Content Paradise store.
4. You buy whatever code frameworks and art that is re-purpose-able from the Unity Asset Store that suit your game(s) idea(s).
5. All that will cost you less than $5000.
6. The important part, after you buy all that and make and publish one very simple game in your spare time to get your feet wet, then you can quit your job and take a sabbatical and try your hand at earning a fortune or just having a job you like, forget the fortune. Give yourself one year. If you aren't productive and really enjoying it (success is secondary) then go back to work in your old profession or consider you might like a brand new profession that isn't computer & IT related - it depends on your progress and enjoyment of that year of sabbatical working on the computer science tech you independently choose. Not enjoying it even when you have full control? Change careers.

 

You really sure about the mobile part?

While it might seem on the outside that there is a ton of profit just waiting to be made in mobile games, and PC / Console is dominated by big expensive AAA productions, I would personally say games fo mobiles will have a way harder time making a profit than games for PC / Consoles

1) Prices has been raced to the bottom. Unless you release small games that are viable to make on a shoestring budget, you will have trouble making a RoI with the current prices in the mobile app stores.
Yes, there are premium games sold at 20$ even today. These most of the times are coming from well known devs or are sequels in long standing series. Try to get into the app store as an unknown dev asking for even 5$ per download. You better have an EXTREMLY polished game, at which point RoI is most probably hard to reach again.
2) Your competition is high. That is true on any platform nowadays. In the mobile App stores the problem still seems to be way worse than on Steam, or on the consoles (where you actually have to get greenlit by Sony or MS first, or need to work with a publisher AFAIK).
Combined with the low prices a pretty much toxic environment for unknown devs releasing their first game.
3) There are no "Indie games" on mobile. Most of them are developed by Indies, yes, but the average mobile player is not really looking for "Indie games"... contrast that to other platforms where you can find your niche as an Indie BECAUSE you are dealing with a different audience.
4) Free to play can work around the first point, yes... free to play is not "free", however. You first need a game that works in a f2p setting. Just taking your average CoD clone, adding a store selling vanity items, or worse, pay to win items is not going to work 99% of the time.
Then you need to put in a lot of work to make sure your game economy is properly balanced for f2p... nothing worse than adding premium items with ingame effects that end up not being attractive enough.
Last you will face the pay2win problem... you can work around that, but if your game is once seen as p2w, its a stigma that you most probably never be able to recover from.
6) Ads and Marketing is everything in the world of mobile games. There seems to be no word of mouth, and I hardly ever heard from a mobile game having achieved any buzz by going viral online. Different audience to especially PC, and a lesser degree Console games again, I guess.
5) There 3 or 4 big devs that have the app stores in their stranglehold. They will sell most of the games, and they will absorb most of the playtime on mobile.

Now, making real money selling games is EXTREMLY hard work with high risk anyway. But currently from what I hear and read, your chances to make some good bucks selling Indie games for PC, or maybe consoles is better than selling lowest tier mobile games on the mobile app stores.
If your game is not total garbage, you could probably sell the same game for 5-10$ to some Indie game freaks on steam, while getting drowned in threes clones within minutes pushing you off the frontpage and not selling a single copy for 1$ on one of the mobile app stores.


Keep in mind that is a very biased, and not 100% scientifically correct opinion of just one hobby dev. If you want real hard numbers some professional devs, Indies or not, would need to chime in.
I just think before you sink your hard earned cash into this endeavour, you should make sure you have weighted the risks correctly on the many platforms you could release to.

 

Going lean like @neginfinity suggested is a great plan I think. It's basically what I am doing although I am not so serious about it as getting into game dev as a business as you seem to be. Just actually starting on my first small game to test those waters.

What I do is just hire out work for bits and pieces here and there. Mainly for art. Using this approach you can tackle as much as you can on your own and only spend money on other people helping you out here and there. It's probably way more cost effective compared to forming a company hiring employees who spend a good chunk of their time playing game, watching funny cat videos and other stuff on company time.

 

Thanks for the replies. @gian-reto align I totally agree with the points you have made and on reflection I will dismiss mobile as a platform to only aim for. I've actually been approved on the Nintendo Developer Program, although I currently do not have a Wii U Dev Machine, this maybe an avenue to take, as well as PC/Steam.

@goat thank you, I will take a look at DAZ and Poser Pro.

I agree, hiring artists when needed and buying custom assets makes total sense to me now at this stage.

 

Getting funding is going to be a lot more difficult than getting a full time job in the industry. Instead of focusing on building a studio, focus on building a game. You don't need money to build a game, and if it shows enough promise, you'll be able to seek funding to take it to the next level.

 

Some good sound advice from @zombiegorilla

There is funding out there if thats the way you want to go but you're going to find it difficult with a lack of experience and no prototype.

I started up on my own in 2004 at the ripe old age of 32 with no games industry experience.
I targeted mobile games because it seemed more realistic for a one man operation than pc games and the competition back then was no where near todays standard.
I made a few games under my own label most of which have made peanuts and I continue to fund myself through contract work in games.
The key for me getting contract work was to get some titles out there and although they didn't do great from a sales point of view they showed I could do a job and that opened the door.

If you want a job then make something, even a prototype, and get to some game dev events in your area and network. Personally I'd have no issues hiring someone who's self taught (also self taught on Vic20, Speccy & Amiga).I think it shows a passion for what you want to do.

If you want to start your own studio then I'll offer some advice when I get there

 

I would not start a game studio until I have a commercially viable game. Dont read success stories and think, I can do that. You cant... (along with about 99% of other developers). The carrot is strong in game dev, but the carrot is a trap. Its actually plastic and non-edible. You will end up broke if you throw all your money into gamedev without alternative income.

You can buy a lot of 3d models out there for cheap depending on what you want to make, then it comes down to pulling them all together and writing the code, etc. Personally I recommend 3drt.com for assets. Lots of good stuff, lots of variation, and all done by one guy, so it all looks the same.

For scripts/other, just roll the asset store.

Work at night, get something finished, when it makes enough money to survive, consider your next step.. your next step might be to forget about game dev. Its hard and often ends up being un-rewarding (at least financially)

 

Is the Crossy Road franchise still the at the top of the charts?

No such thing as "indie games" on mobile is a bit misleading. There are many succesful games made by small teams.

Edit: The general sentiment that mobile is saturated and hard to get noticed on does seem true. It's just the no indie part that rings false.

 

I wouldn't start a business without first having tested my product in the market. Some of the others have already given good advice on ways to get started without committing to a full business with paid staff and such, so I won't repeat that... but I will say not to rely on selling something unless you've got concrete evidence to believe you can in fact sell it.

When I hire (though I haven't done that for a while now) I don't care about your age or your culture or your gender or how you dress (as long as you do!).

First, I care about your portfolio. Every single person I hired showed me completed work that they had done. Most of them were university students, so most of the work being showed off was personal projects. (Assignment work doesn't count.) This demonstrated that they could do complex tasks, that they could solve problems, and - most importantly - that they could finish things.

After that follows technical skill (in terms of problem solving, not trivia), willingness to learn on the job (because if you can't then you're not very useful in this field), communication skill, teamwork skill, professional/social fit in the team. I've probably missed some... but really, the portfolio is the critical starting point for me. If you can't demonstrate some track record of completing projects in your area then everything else is academic.

 

1. Make a game.
2. Find people who want to and will buy that game.
3. Support the game, fix bugs, get players to talk about it.
4. Wait a few months to a year to see how that goes.
   
5. Decide whether it was all worth it.
6. Repeat.

 

I've stopped working on my project because I did something really stupid and deleted a bunch of work on accident, so I'm looking to start a new project. I'm starting it to get over the feels of losing all that hard work.

More to the point: once I decided to start a new project, I realized I needed 1. a plan and 2. decent art.

I put some work to those aims and discovered this thread today:

Its form 2009.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/hiring-artist-how-much-does-it-cost.19847/

Basically if you want to contract artwork for your game, try doing it out of the US. From what I know overseas $8/Hr USD is higher than average for a lot of people. Just make sure you have some way of keeping them accountable. I have a friend who has been burned by people just taking his money and running off with it. Do what a few have said here, like AngryPenguin, ask for a portfolio, some proof of ability.

Myself I plan to put up some ads here on campus to see if anyone wants to work together or something. Failing that my personal money is going to be doing the above.

 

I think you should create and test your prototype, before start making a game.

 

That's part of making the game.

 

I'm not entirely convinced on this point. At that price you are pretty much cut out of all of the traditional western markets. This brings several problems

• Language barriers
• No recourse for fraud
• Difficult to judge the quality of potential employees
• Rework
• Time zones

Don't get me wrong, it can work. But after my experiences hiring out work to low wage economies, I tend to think paying the guy just up the road at three times the hourly rate is more economic.

 

I disagree with hiring artists as well... the world is full of scammers of every color/nationality. Finding a good artist is difficult. The artists that wont rip you off, will be expensive. You always get what you pay for. Comes down to the triangle...

Fast, Cheap, Good. Pick two.

Assets made by different people rarely blend together and look amateur when thrown together. It will cost you more, take longer, and the end result will often be rubbish, unless you intend to hire them to do your entire catalog of assets.

Buy existing packs that fit what you want to do. Less risk, you know what you're getting, no lead times, etc...

 

Every good artist I've ever come in contact with is very iffy if they have a timeslot for your game art. It's not like the artists at the Tate Modern with their jars full of urine art are waiting on your calls to make zombie game art for you.

 

Heck yes.

Prototype to see if people like the general concept. Then make a demo to see if they still like it and want more of it. Then figure out how to quantify that and, if there's enough sales potential* to warrant full production... do it.

The idea is to give yourself as many opportunities as early as possible to find out if the project is a commercial dud and, if so, move onto the next thing. Dropping a project isn't a bad thing and can often be a good thing - you'll never get to make all of the games you want, so you don't want to waste time on the ones people don't want to play. A lot of people call this the "Fail Fast" approach, but I prefer to think of it as "Find The Right Thing To Do More Quickly" approach, because the point isn't about failing, it's about moving on to find success.

* Or if you're enjoying it as a hobby - this doesn't have to be a business to everyone.

 

This completely. I am an older person too, but I would suggest that you do not take yourself seriously until you have put a game out there and it has earned at least minimum wage for the amount of hours you put into it.

My second advice, learn to program and design yourself. Without a commercially viable game in your pocket, you are in for a world of hurt if you try to hire different people to do every part of your game.. There is a ton of riff-raff out there when it comes to ´developers´..and a huge amount of horror stories of people who don´t know how to program or create games hiring random people.

You, yourself can create a commercially viable game with a few months of learning C# and free assets, especially a mobile game where the gameplay is more important than graphics. And at the very least, prototyple the entire game using blocks and cubes to make sure you have the chops to get things done.

 

You mean something besides not maintaining version control for your source and backups of your assets?

 

Well, maybe my statement wasn't clear enough.

What I wanted to say is: on PC, and to a lesser degree on Consoles there is an audience interested in Boutique and Indie games. They are looking for a SPECIFIC expeirience, not necessarily the most AAA one they can get.
When the general interest is finding a game that hooks and entertains you for hours, and you have time to sit down and play games for just as long, you are looking for a more diverse set of expieriences.

On mobiles, there are just "games", to most of its audience. They download timekillers to play on the train MOSTLY. Sure, there are also people that play on their mobiles exclusively and DO sit down with their device for hours, thus looking for a more PC/Console game like expierience... but I would guess that is a minority of mobile players.

Also, generally you have less "invested" gamers on mobile. They might sink a lot of time into playing their games of choice... but they do not identify themselves as gamers... they spend less time informing themselves about games... thus they most probably have no way to tell if the game they are playing are developed by an Indie, or AAA Studio.

Add to that that the visual differences between a polished Indie and a cheap AAA title on mobile are even blurrier than on PC / Consoles, and I can bet that the amount of people who actually care about "Indie games" on mobile are so small that you might as well drop the monicker.
Yes, people still play mobile Indie titles. Calling yourself "Indie" will not help sell your game though, not as much as it did in the last few years on PC, or sometimes on Consoles.

Well, great! While I wouldn't really start developing for the Wii U (Its kind of a failed platform), the 3DS is going strong, and you can expect quite some hype with the new NX console coming out 2017 (most probably, Nintendo is kinda tight lipped about it).

If the NX turns out to be a viable concept IDK though. Given that there have been rumours of a two-in-one device, and yet again controller shenigans like with the Wii U, IDK really if Nintendo puts out a solid traditional console that would certainly have a solid sell rate based on strong first party titles (NES, SNES, Gamecube, N64 to a lesser degree), or try to aim for the moon again trying to replicate the surprise success of the Wii...
I fear it is the latter, and IMO Nintendo should rather do either the former (even if its just a weedier Playstation, plenty of good games would sell it), or at least put out a Wii on steroids instead of forcing themselves innovating when they obviously don't have enough good ideas (if the Wii U is any indication).

Anyway... never forget, you can always come back to mobile once you have a foot in the door on other platforms. I would say going mobile will ALWAYS be a huge risk, a lot of big AAA devs failed doing that (and many others avoid mobile games like the plague because of that).
Still, might be more viable to go to mobile with an established IP and fanbase.

 

@Ryiah you know whats mordibly funny about that? I was trying to use github (more like learn how to use it) when it happened.

I hadn't done a commit in weeks, and without knowing exactly what I was doing, managed to hit "Rebase -> Dsicard changes". So yeah. Its gone. All gone (cept' for the work 3 weeks or so prior). The point is I was learning! I think I learned something though. Don't mess with your project if you're in the learning stages. Create a separate project to mess with. +commit often. In my defense I had trouble figuring out just how to do that...

Additionally, as much as I try I tend to make a bunch of really stupid mistakes (call em' blunders) haha

 

It did occur to me that the problem may very well have occurred during an attempt to backup the files.

 

Wow. Moral of the story.

• Learn to use git from command-line
• Don't experiment on active project
• Make commits every day (3..5 per day or one per feature being implementied/bug fixed)
• Push at the end of each day.
• Maintain backups of the repo.

If you only lost 3 weeks, that's salvageable, although redoing all that work would still suck (but you should be able to do it in half of the time).

Speaking of which, beware of using Google Drive as an automatic backup system. This thing has a nasty habit of silently nuking your files. In case of failure to sync it can silently delete all your files and replace them with the older uploaded version. All without any sort of warnings or notifications. (thankfully at the very least it puts them into recycle bin)

 

This is absolutely wrong. No one cares how old you are, just about your skills. If anything age and life experience will be valued.

 

Smart lady

 

Don't know how long ago that was but you should keep basic delete file recovery programs on hand even though they are rarely used. No need to take to the level of data recovery expert.

 

@goat I had never heard of that. I will do some research on that then!!!

I'll stop hijacking this thread now xD

 

An extremly good advice... saved my hide when I told my girlfriend to back up her iPod to the backup drive of my NAS and forgot to switch off the NAS' daily backups....
Of course the NAS wiped the drive before backing up. Lucky the NAS was almost empty and the backup drive was a 1TB drive.

With a restore program I was able to recover 99% of her files.

What basically happens when you delete files is that they are marked "dirty" or ready to be overwritten. The OS will not really "delete" the files as in "remove them from the drive", as that would be taking longer than just marking them "not used any longer".
But the OS will stop showing you the data still there on the drive, and the "dirty" parts of the disk will be reused as soon as you write additional data.

Thus:
1. Almost everything can be recovered with a special program that accesses the disk directly and can read the raw data, given you use the program just after having wrongly deleted.
2. Any subsequent write to the disk can overwrite the data you wanted to recover, thus drop every activity immidiatly before doing the recovery.
3. If you are unlucky, and the system started reusing the space, you might still be able to partially recover the data. Not that useful for images (got some funny "half-images" with missing heads out of that) or music (yeah, I wouldn't even try to listen to that anymore), might still be useful for text based documents.


This is also why old drives from many big companies are not only wiped before recycling, but also overwritten and wiped many times to make sure all traces of the files are gone (well, the second and subsequent times it has to do with some magnetic charge that could be left in device and apparently some people being able to restore parts of the data just from that)... then the drive is mechanically destroyed, sometimes even shredded.

Take away: if you want your data REALLY gone, atomize your Harddrive, don't just delete it

 

There are fraudsters and cheats everywhere, but as you said the difference between hiring people from poorer countries is that you have no legal options. And it gets even worse for you if you are in the west because you can be sued. for copyright infringement if your ´artist´ stole his artwork from another game. I played WOW for many years, and I had an artist from russia try to sell me ´cheap´ art that I immediately recognized. If I didn´t happen to play WOW, I would have no way of knowing. Imagine putting a game up and then having Blizzard coming after you. With so much art out there in quality games, and the ease at which these guys can rip that art from games, it is impossible for a developer to know. You would have to have a really big open beta and hope one of your testers comments on it from a game they happened to play.

The rest of the stuff you mentioned.. meh.. easy enough to work around. But for hiring artists, I would only do it from a country where you have legal recourse, or if it is a quality artist from the asset store who you contact for custom stuff. This is the method I am doing now. There are a couple of amazing guys who sell stuff very cheap. Contact them for custom stuff, and then give them the right to sell it on the asset store ( you will get a better price). But man, my days of hiring from forums or hiring from people who email me are long gone.

 

side topic: You dont need web based source control. You can have a form of source control on the same pc if you like. Of course if the one drive dies, you're poked...

I have my SC on a separate server at home. Every now and then I back-up the entire repo online, but for the interim, the main benefit of SC is diffing files. Especially good if something stops working and youve been messing with a bunch of code and youre not sure exactly what you changed that porked your code.