So, so very
much to talk about. First off, I’ve mentioned in the last post about two investors putting together a game studio in
Roseville. I've since been in the physical studio still in construction. It's not even sheet rocked yet and probably won't be ready until March. But they've decided to get some game projects going now, so
starting next week, myself and two people I’ve picked
from the Dawnshine team will start prototyping out our first game. If that works
out, it means bigger and better things, including the possibility of me hiring
more artists and programmers from Dawnshine to work professionally for a funded
studio. I've worked for game studios professionally before, but always as a telecommuter. I hate telecommuting. I like talking to people face to face and seeing what people are doing when ever I need to. So this will be a new experience for me, one I'm excited about.
As for
Dawnshine, I’m very glad that I reached out to Professor Matthew Stoehr, chair
of the Art New Media Department of the second largest college in Sacramento--American
River College. He's been sending me his students. I’ve been really
impressed with the quality of work they're doing. I actually went to ARC myself starting in the
1990s back when I was determined to major in every single subject ever created
before I finally settled transferring to CSUS in 2005 to get my degree in Psychology
and graduated 4 years later with my Anthropology BA(and now I’m back at ARC
getting a Business AA degree). But in
all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever met an instructor that was as passionate
about improving the skills of his students as Matt is. He’s a hard teacher though from what I’ve
heard. He expects a lot from his
students.
In addition
to sending his current and former students our way to work on the Dawnshine
project, he’s been helping out with some behind the scenes stuff. There are a lot of technical art issues we’ve
needed some help with. Just knowing that
I can turn to Matt for help on those issues is a relief. Plus having an artist of Matt's caliber associated with this project really gives us some credibility. It's really tough saying to people, "Hey, I'm just some random guy with a dream and no money. Please take me seriously." People like that are a dime a dozen. And although I know Dawnshine is a stand out project, it's hard overtly showing that to others.
I get about 1-3 emails a day from people interested in joining the project. That sounds awesome, though most of the emails I get are basically, "I don't know anything about programming, but I play a lot of games. When can I start?" And that's great. I love it that people are excited enough just from seeing what little is on our website about it enough to write me. But trying to attract people of a high enough skill level to be useful on this project is pretty tough. All of the people on the team right now are talented enough to be working at a game studio professionally. And even though we don't have funding, we still need skilled people to make the type of game that will attract investors.
Aside from
that, the art team has been working on concepts. I know, here we are a year later, and we
still haven’t modeled very much. But the
more time we spend on concepts, the better looking the game will be. I’m really happy about the direction the
artists are taking now. I feel like we’re
a lot more organized than we’ve ever been.
Despite having a smaller team, we’re getting far more work done than
before. It makes me think I should have
started out small from the beginning and added people slowly instead of trying to start off with a big
team.
Starting out with a big team just made things really chaotic and
disorganized. The first artist I recruited told me that if I didn't recruit a big team right off the bat, she'd quit. So I did, and she quit right after anyways. Lesson learned. People that are hard to work with and demanding don't want to be there in the first place.
Our
Programmer team has been pretty stable as well.
In fact, we haven’t parted with a programmer since August, though we
have added some, making it as large as the art team. My father owns a small drafting company and
he’s going to let the programming team hold our meetings there. That’ll be pretty cool to be coding side by
side with the rest of the team instead of meeting at a pizza place and just talking about the coding we've been doing. The
downside is that it’s in Roseville, which is even further away for the Elk
Grove, Vacaville people. But we might
carpool.
I formed a
third team consisting of a 2d artist, a programmer, and our audio guy. We started jokingly calling it the A
Team. Their task is to come up with
spell effects. The HeroEngine already
has a cool FX system in place, though there’s a few ways we want to adapt it to
the Dawnshine Project specifically, hence why the programmer on that team. We had our first meeting as a team at my dad’s
office.
As for
future teams, I’ve split off a Level Design team from the main art team. It’s still a little shaky. We need more artists and level designers, then
it should be ok eventually.
I’m also
looking to put together a management and business development team. I need help with organizing tasks, so an
Assistant Producer would be useful. That
would give me more time to focus on recruiting and writing design
documentation. If I recruited a
recruiter, that would save me even more time, though they’d have to be really
good to replace me. Finally, I’d like to
recruit a grant writer. Believe it or
not, but the game industry is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in
the US. First off, it’s considered
IT. And anything relating to technology,
the US wants to keep in the US. Since
tech jobs tend to pay a lot higher, that means more tax revenue. Considering that the Canadian government pays
American game companies big money to relocate to Canada, the US wants to do
what it can to keep those jobs state side.
The other
reason is that game development can cover so many other mediums: tech,
education, music, art, research and development, the internet, commerce, and a
few I’m probably forgetting, a single game dev company can qualify for multiple,
otherwise unrelated, government grants and tax subsidies. Now, I’m not the least bit a fan of taking
government money. However, I’m a pretty
big fan of being able to actually start paying my peeps. The idea of walking through the middle of an
office full of happy artists and programmers plugging away at one of our game
projects, that’s probably the most awesome thing I could imagine.
