Merry
Christmas everyone,
So this
Christmas break is the longest time off I've had since the Dawnshine project
began. More specifically, it’s the
longest break between meetings. We’re
not going to start meeting again until January 2013. It gives me a chance to reorganize. Two things here. One, I’ve been meeting with investors lately. And two, I've recently completed a semester
of management classes.
The
investors I've been talking to, I haven’t talked to them much about
Dawnshine. Why? Because it would be a waste of time to do so
at this point, this early in. But what
has been helpful is to learn the investment side of things by talking to
angels, going to VC seminars, and reading as many articles on the subject as I
can. You can set up your interests
through LinkedIn and read a new article or two on funding a day.
I have a
completely different game project that I think would be hugely successful and
highly disruptive, and I’ve now had two completely different investors tell me
they’d be interested in it, but I need to set up some infrastructure and solve
some technical issues for it. But that’s
something I’d also like to get started.
I just haven’t had time.
Taking
management classes has been helping as well.
Want to hear something pretty embarrassing? Not long after I graduated Sac State with a
BA in Anthropology, I applied for a large tech company looking for a Culture
Change Instructor. Well, I had just
gotten my Anthro degree with a Culture shift and I have over a decade
professional experience as an instructor, so I applied. Yeah, um, now that I actually understand what
“culture change” means from a business stand point, I feel pretty dumb. I bet they looked at my application and shook
their heads.
A friend of
mine graduated with me. She was telling
me about how her Anthro degree should help her get a marketing position because
she better knew how to market products to a diverse group of people based on
her better understanding of cultural values.
It made sense to me at the time, but yeah, I understand a little better
how completely wrong that is. People
into marketing only spend a part of their time trying to sell stuff. They spend the majority of their time analyzing
trends, mapping out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to individual
businesses, and trying to predict changes in entire markets. Anthropologists can't do 1/10th of what a marketer
can do in the business world.
Speaking of
business, I might be landing another opportunity. I've been talking to an up and coming game company. If I were to get involved with them, it would
not deter my time spent on Stigma Games.
In fact, I think working for another game company could actually make
things better. I haven’t signed
anything, so of course, it may or may not happen. But in light of these events and some
reflection, I've decided to fundamentally alter the course for Stigma Games.
Right now we’re
a group of people working on a game for the fun of it, with the hope that it
could one day turn into something. Most
of the people on the team are just here for experience to help them get a job elsewhere. And that’s fine too.
While this
approach has been fine in the past, I will instead start treating Stigma Games
as a serious company currently bootstrapping, but moving towards a strong proof
of concept with Dawnshine that would allow us to start attracting
investors. I say this due to the fact
that there are people currently on the team taking Dawnshine seriously,
investors taking us seriously, and other professionals from tech companies in
the area that I meet a mixers and things taking us seriously.
On the other
hand, there are people on our team that see this as a fun project to drop in
and out of when they have time. And I’ve
thought in the past that if I start taking this too seriously, those people
might quit. Considering how extremely
hard this project is to manage with people coming and going and maybe doing 10
hours worth of work this week or 3 months from now, I need to start taking a
more hard line approach. I’ve been
afraid of getting the “You know you’re not paying me, right?” line if I try and
push production too much and we might start losing people. But more importantly, if I don’t start
pushing the team, we’re going to start losing the top performers that get
frustrated that the project isn't serious enough.
I’ll list
another example. There is a concept of a
hut. It’s an unusual concept, and one I
think will be really awesome once it’s modeled.
I believe it was created back in March or April. I first passed it off to a modeler who never
finished it and faded away from the team.
I assume she’s no longer part of the team because she doesn't contact me
any more. So I passed it off to someone
else, who also disappeared. Finally, we
recruited another person who wanted something simple to work on. I passed it to him and never heard from him
again. Will the fourth person I pass it
to do it in a week or will this simple hut take years before someone finally
does it?
Now, if I
wanted to recruit a level designer to design the capitol city for the Neg Wath
and I had a whole list of assets needed first and some of them could be
completed next week and others years from now(who knows?), I have no idea what
to tell the level designer when he’d be able to start. It sucks to say this, but I’m going to have
to remove people from the team who are given tasks and either don’t do them by
next week or don’t keep me in the loop on their progress. Managing this project is an impossible task
if I can’t rely on people to do what they tell me they’re going to do or keep
me informed when they have problems.
I don’t
think people on the team are flaky or bad people. Mostly, I don’t think I've done a very good
job at explaining to the team the importance of being organized or how tight
our pipeline is as we start creating different specialized teams that need A
done before they can start on B. This is
especially hard if A and B are done by different teams. Why rush to finish something that’s needed by
someone you haven’t even met or are aware of?
I have
photographers taking pictures of things we need for the modelers to do their
thing. They've never worked on a game
project. They don’t come to the art
meeting. They don’t understand that when
I need something by next week before a modeler can finish their asset, emailing
me 3 months later asking if I still need it done, isn't going to fly.
But again, I
don’t blame the members of my team. I
blame myself for not better communicating how interconnected everyone’s work
is, even to other members of the project that they haven’t even met because
they go to different production meetings.
2013 is a
new year. Hopefully each year gets
better for us. We’ll see how it goes.
