Now I am Become Game Studio

5.5 Easy Steps to Create Your Own Game Studio

I was puzzling over where to begin the blog and after a brief deliberation I decided to start at the beginning.  Where else, dum-dum (he said to himself)?

So here’s a “brief” checklist, from my experience, of things you want to do when you decide to make a video game.

What follows is largely centered around the business side of things, so if that’s not of interest, I recommend you steer WELL clear of the rest of this post.  Save your eyes some pain.  Go outside and drink in the glory of nature.  Have a conversation with a friend or loved one or loved friend.  Build a model.  Paint your house red.  Paint your neighbor’s house red.  Paint the whole town red.  But whatever you do, don’t read any of this.

Step 0.5 - Don’t Go It Alone

Unless your name is Toby Fox, Eric Barone, or Alice DJ, I personally believe that you are not better off alone, not in life and certainly not when undertaking a project as vast and all consuming as the production of a video game.

I am a man who compulsively regurgitates the wise words of other people and so I’d like to share a few choice quotes:

“Sadness shared is divided, happiness shared is multiplied.” - My Mom (not really)
“If you want to go fast, go alone.  If you want to go far, go together.” - Unknown
“No man is an island.” - John Donne

Sure, you could go off and build a wonderful video game all on your own, but I submit to you that that same game might have been better if you had built it with a friend. Further, I’d bet all the hair on my head you’ll have an easier, more joyful time doing it if you’re not agonizing over every little decision by yourself, in a cave, in the dark.  

In my case, I’m working with one of my favorite people in the whole world whom I respect, admire, and rely upon.  His name is also Eric, and I recommend that whomever you find to work with you on your new game share the same first name as you too.  I’ve found that to be very important when you want to confuse people.

Step 1 - I quit, Monty!

Quit your job and make sure to sign up for COBRA, if that’s an option, because healthcare in this country is a stagnant mire of corruption and evil.

Step 2 - Law Talkin’ Guys

Find a law firm and tell them you’d like to start a business.  Make sure you have plenty of cash on hand because the government, the lawyers, and anyone else standing in the way along the path to your beautiful new business will definitely be trying to take a lot of it from you.

Did you know that by law you are required to buy and present a labor law poster in your place of business?  Can you print this sheet of paper out yourself?  No, you may not.  That will be $94 and you should see it in the mail after we finish printing it for six months.

Aside from starting the business, I also had my lawyer draw up a contract that I could use and reuse (lawyers are expensive) for any contractors I was planning on hiring.  I made the decision early on to work with freelancers rather than hire full time employees and I wanted to be ready to hit the ground running once I had found people to work on the game’s artwork.

Step 3 - Business Tedium

Here’s some clerical tedium.  You’ll need to open a business bank account.  Once you have your LLC (Limited Liability Company) setup, you’ll want to keep the company’s funds separate from your own personal funds.  That way, if someone decides to sue your pants off, there’s a clear delineation between your personal funds and those of your business.

Step 4 - Start Writing

Congratulations!  You’re now a business owner.  CEO!  Top dog!  Woof woof!  In truth, you are King/Queen of Nothing, for at this moment, you preside over the whisper of a dream.  

So I’m telling this story a little out of order.  For me, Step 4 was actually begun before I decided to quit my job.  I needed time to work up the courage and become comfortable with the notion of working for myself, without pay, for at least a year.  So, I took two weeks off to begin expanding upon a short story I’d written in 2017 called Voodoo Detective.  I worked closely with my friend and writing partner Eric Ackerman whom I mentioned in Step 0.5.

After two weeks of writing, I was convinced that quitting my job was the right call.  As a sidebar, I was very lucky, financially speaking, to have that as an option.  I had a lot of fun iterating on the story with Eric and like nothing in my professional career had ever inspired in me, I was incandescent with excitement for the future.  I should mention that, by trade, I am a programmer.

Once I’d left my job, we spent close to two months iterating on the story before we sent it out to all our (exceedingly kind and generous and beautiful) families and friends for feedback.  From there, we had several further rounds of revisions and in fact, we still revise the story from time to time even now as we are quickly approaching one year of production.

Step 5 - Contractors

I’ve decided to write a separate blog post about our character design, background art, UI design, and animation, but since this meandering document seems to be focused on the business/procedural side of things, I wanted to share a few lessons learned in regard to working with contractors, or indeed, with any human beings.  Take it all with a grain of salt because I am not an authority on running a business nor am I particularly adept at interpersonal communication.  At best, I am a dilettante and at worst, I am an arrant fraud spreading misinformation.

The Hunt

When I began looking for artists, we weren’t entirely sure what aesthetic we were shooting for.  We knew we wanted to make a 2D game.  We knew it was to be a love letter to the old LucasArts and Sierra adventure games.  We knew the game was set in the 1930s.  We knew it had its roots in noir detective stories.  We knew the setting was largely going to be a tropical one.  Beyond that, we didn’t start out with a firm grasp on the style we were aiming for, but we obviously had a few hints. I decided to start looking for our background artists first because I figured their style would help set the tone for all other artwork in the game. 

Wait a minute, Eric!  How do you find artists?  Well, I’m glad you asked, friend!  As a student of computer science, in that past I’ve had the opportunity to write a web crawler.  A web crawler is a program that… crawls the web.  I would give my web crawler a “seed” website, for instance:

https://www.shortsleeve.studio/

The web crawler would read every link on that website and then travel to each of those websites in turn.  From there it would repeat the process, spreading outward like a spider scuttling across the web. Or perhaps a tree growing outwards from a seed.

I found artists in much the same way a web crawler would.  I’d start out with a “seed” artist on Twitter that I admired.  From there, I would look at the artists they admired and so on.  Sometimes I’d come across hashtags that different groups of artists would use.  For instance, #thisisanimation lead me to a number of animators.  Another website I used to search for artists is called http://artstation.com/.  Both are good choices.

These artists were scattered across the globe, and while at first I was set on having only local artists work on the game, it soon became apparent that that would be an untenable proposition and perhaps not even an altogether desirable one.  Especially once COVID reared its savage, ugly head and rendered geographic proximity an academic consideration (apart from time zone differences).

The very first person I reached out to was Bruce Brenneise, our lead background artist.  I actually got to meet him in person just before people were starting to quarantine.  I think we really lucked out with Bruce. He’s a cunning, intelligent artist with a sharp eye and a kind, patient disposition.  He’s been a pleasure to work with and instrumental in guiding the style for our backgrounds.

These are some of the very first references we put together to try to help figure out the direction we wanted to push our background style:

Wisdom

Great, so you’ve found an artist!  I think this is where I can share my first (and as it turns out, only) lesson learned.

“Communicate clearly, often, and with kindness.” - Eric Fulton ;)
“Hey, hey, hey, hey-now. Don’t be mean; we don’t have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.” - Buckaroo Banzai

One thing I’ve learned about freelance artists, and freelancers in general, is that they are often juggling multiple projects at once (not to mention their personal lives during these troubled times).  

It’s important to make sure you set expectations for yourself and for the people working on your game with respect to your desired timelines, deliverables, the number of revisions you expect, how you plan to handle feedback, when you intend to call a piece of artwork finished, and how you want to tackle unplanned changes (which do tend to crop up over time as the game evolves). Communicating as many details as possible upfront helps lubricate the interaction between artist and game developer until you begin to understand one another’s rhythms. Even then, it’s good to keep communicating as much as possible.

I thought I had more wisdom to share than that, but I think that covers it.  Communication is a good wisdom.

Four Pages, Are You Kidding?

While this isn’t exactly a graceful place to stop, I didn’t intend for these posts to get so darn long! Surely you must be tired of reading!  Also it’s Saturday and we should all be relaxing!  What the heck am I even doing?  I’ll stop here, but I’ve got many other wonderful and exciting game development stories to share later.  Thanks for reading!

Love,
Eric Fulton