In case you don’t know it by now, this story is part of a series of posts. This is my story, on how I started a small studio and starting working on a first indie game, with all lessons learned in the path.

So in the previous post we started our own indie game studio, called Mismatch Studio.

Then, what’s next? Well let’s start by creating the next best game ever! Well the good news is that you can do it, with enough effort, resources and time. The bad news is that it is not magic.

Game Concept

So how can I start? First, if you haven’t thought of a game title or gameplay already you’ll need to start thinking about a concept you like. So you can start by remembering which are the games you liked the most and think of what you liked so much about them. You will get into a path which can take you months or years, so you better like the concept and feel passionate about it.

In my case, I know I can remember at least 5 or 6 games that were relevant to me. I remember I liked Lemmings when I had a SNES and also Super Metroid, among some other games from SNES and other older or newer consoles. So I decided to work on an idea around a Lemmings-like game.

At this point, I didn’t have a name, look and feel or anything like it. And even if you have already an idea you will have to consider that as a good starting point, but it will be continuously changing as the project evolves.

So this part is really important, you don’t need to know what the path is first, but you need to know where you want to get to. This is your goal.

Scoping

Steps required for this:

1. Open Microsoft Word.
2. Start writing and pasting images.
3. Close Microsoft Word.

Once you had an idea of the game, you will need to structure all the information that is inside your head. This is not an easy task to do. But you will have to write everything that comes to your mind when you are thinking about how would you like your game to feel. Yes, that’s right. Feel. You like games, music and movies because of how they made you feel. So, in a way, developing games is more art than it is engineering.

Now, back to your head. In this empty canvas, called Word document, start writing everything that comes to your head. I’ll give you a hint, so you don’t have to do everything by yourself:

• Possible names for the game
• Genre: Is it adventure, platformer, FPS, Puzzle?
• Gameplay: Is it going to be a 3D game, 2D game, 2.5D game (ok you may not know what this is, but once you Google it you know you have played many of these), and so on.
• Look & Feel: Go to google images and start searching for games that you think are close to what you are looking for. Is it going to be reallistic, low poly, etc? Is it going to be futuristic, in another planet, etc.
• Music, Sounds: Is it going to be cute music, electronic music, horror? search for some other examples on Youtube
• Scenes: Think of how the worlds or levels can look like, and search for reference images
• Players: Think of how the players can look like. Don’t be specific, it is not time to do that. Just some references on similar characters you remember from other games.
• Enemies: Think also of enemies and bosses that are close to your style
• Story: Every game needs a story behind. Just write a couple of lines on what the story of the game is, why it starts where it does, and what do you want to acomplish at the end.

Ok, by now the concept of the game is looking better. And you also have a more clear idea about the game. Now just label it. Pick one of the names you liked and put that as a title to your document. Save it and close Microsoft Word. If there’s absolutely no name you can think of, just name it “Project Alpha” or whatever. But as soon as you have a name do it, you don’t want to spend 6 months thinking on the game’s name. If at any point you like another name better, you can always change it.

In our case, we called our name Dumb Little Creatures.

Back to school

So you thought you would never had to read a book again. Wrong. Now is the time to learn about the development process and all the tools you will need. In the next posts, we’ll go through the details of that. But since you don’t know nothing at this point, or at least not too much or have gaps, I’ll walk you through. That said, you’ll need to do your own homework:

• Read as many blogs as you can
• View as many youtube videos as you can
• Search and read books about it
• Look again any games that are relevant to you and try to understand what makes them great

If the blogs, books or videos are too specific you can skip those parts. But doing this you can get an idea of everything that is involved. And also learn from other people. In my case, I bought The Art of Game Design book, as I read on many blogs. Read as much as I could, and watched as many YouTube Videos as I could for a couple of weeks.

Being a software developer, I’m already familiar with project planning and part of the process, which I’d think is quite similar. Let me just outline it for you:

• Art & design
• Engineering AKA programming
• QA
• Publish
• PR & Marketing

Publish, PR & Marketing

Ok, I’ll leave the first bullets for later, but not without saying this first (and you should know this if you already did your homework and read enough blogs and watched videos). Don’t leave this to the end and start marketing your game the day you launch. You don’t want to launch your game with zero people other than your family knowing about it, or have your game ready to launch and find out that creating accounts to publish or getting a publisher takes time. This is a full time job that needs to start probably the very first day you do a sketch, have the game’s name or write a line of code. More on that later.

This story is part of a series of posts. You can follow up here:

First Story | Previous Story | Next Story (in development…)

Think of your company name

Ok, this is not the first step. This is the second step after you took your decision. So as in any company you have to separate the product from the company. In this case, being a game studio obviusly we want to create games (which are the product). But even if I already have an idea of the game I want to create, we need to create a company around that.

It’s just logic, so thinking in the future you won’t stick only to 1 title. You want to create different titles, and even if you are succesful with your title and get it to be a franchise there should be a clear line between the parent company and the game. We just want to avoid renaming later, like Snapchat dropping the “chat” part since it’s no longer only that. Or don’t want the name to become obsolete like “Radioshack” in a world where there are no radios.

So first things first. We need to label the company. We need to think on what is the Vision of the company. This seems to be taken out of a Business Class 101. While it may seem boring this is an important step. You need to be able to identify yourself with the name you choose. You also need to think ahead to avoid the kind of problems I mentioned. And the company name has to be somehow related with the vision.

The vision is also important. Are you a service company? Are you a publisher? Are you a marketing company? You have to think about it. Business logic depends on that. Even if you are not doing it for the money, you don’t want to go broke. So financial planning is crucial, and funding and cash flow is escencial. It doesn’t matter which kind of company you choose. All of them can be succesful. The way that there are succesful ballet dancers and succesful heavy metal bands, being just the opposite. But you have to choose one, and stick to it, so that every decision you make down the road is aligned, and won’t take contradictory decisions or steps that will take you in a wrong path.

In my case I decided to label it: Mismatch Studio

Why? Well Studio I wanted it to send the message that it is a small company and we do handcrafted art (even if we do it in a really small scale). Many other game development companies are studios themselves, so even that it may sound really common, it just fits for us. And Mismatch, because I wanted a single word, and one that could transmit our personality. Mismatch for me has two interpretations. One is that we don’t actually want to fit with all norms on purpose or just be an outlier, and the second interpretation is that we are clumsy and don’t get things right, which can also make us laugh of ourselves. Both meanings fit for us, so Mismatch Studio it is.

• Additional note: I have founded some other companies in the past. I don’t really think you have to spend that much time thinking about the name. Enough time is ok, but don’t spend 3 months in that. At the end, any name can be a good one (for example, think of any combination of words like Blue Whale, Sad Rabbit, etc), and most of them are really generic, so it’s just a matter for you to getting familiar with it, embrace it and start feeling it like yours.

Ok, got it. So what’s next?

Think of a logo

Ok, we have a name, don’t we need to hire a professional to do the logo. It depends. Probably you will need him to render it, and have different drafts of it. Experts have a way to find value on certain things of logos. For some companies, the logo itself is the best representation of their brand, and that has value. Think of Coca Cola or BMW, the company is more recognisable than their individual products. In this case, a game studio, not so much. Do you know the name of the studio behind individual hits? On some cases you do, on some others you don’t. At the end, the game title is the one that sticks. On some other cases it’s not clear which is the development studio and which is the publisher. Difficult to tell. I recognize some brands like Capcom, Konami, EA, Ubisoft, etc. Some others are smaller Rovio, Devolver, Zenga, etc. And some others probably I’ve never heard about them, even if I’ve played the game.

Anyway, think of a logo. Yes, do it rightaway. Don’t wait until you have that many opinions. But it is helpful to start shaping the company, you will start getting familiar with the name and logo and feel it like yours. You can improve it later. If you are a parent this is the same, you can spend nine months thinking about babies names, but at the end you choose one, and when time passes by you cannot think of your baby named different. And just as your baby, it may not be the greatest looking baby in the world, but you will love him.

Start getting your accounts

Ok, for me this is an important step. This is something you don’t need right now, but people tend to do this at the very end. Get a domain, get a website, get emails accounts, get a Facebook or Twitter account, etc. You know already you’ll need them. Why wait any longer? The sooner you do it the sooner you will find if the domain name you dreamed of is not available (If you need a domain try searching for it on Godaddy or Namecheap). And also the sooner you do all of that you will start shaping the company as a company. Another reason to do it is because some of the accounts take time.

You think you’ll need to become a partner with Nintendo? Or open an App Store account? Don’t try to do it some days before you plan the launch. Do it right away, so when you are in the middle of the development you know all things are taken care of. Also, by having already a website and email account, you can start setting everything else using that. Not just your yahoo account from 1999.

Get your website running

Same as thinking of the company name, don’t spend that much time into that. It will depend whether you have considered this in your budget or not, and how cool you want your website to look like. But my guess is that this is not where you want to spend all your money. Go for proven solutions like Squarespace, Wordpress or Wix, choose the best template you can find (I know they are not exactly how you imagined) but they do have a lot of great templates, they are affordable, work fine and you won’t have to spend any additional time with this.

After you chose a template, you will need to set all the content. By doing so you’ll have to think again about your vision and the message you want to send to the people. So this is the perfect excercise you can do.

Ok so that’s it. After this, you have chosen to create a Game Studio, you named it, created all social media accounts, and already have a website and a business email account. So now, let’s focus on our first product!!

Things are just heating up!

This story is part of a series of posts. You can follow up here:

First Story | Previous Story | Next Story

So, this is a story of how a new game studio was born, and what are the things you have to do if are interested in following that path.

First of all, I want to share my background.

My name is Juan Pablo, I have been running a software development company for 10 years now. And this time I just felt like doing something different. Didn’t want to focus on being a service company, but building a product of my own. Having worked on many projects before I was certain on this. But didn’t want to focus only in creating a “disruptive” app or anything like that. I just wanted to create something I would be in love with, and not have to deal with B2B stuff, such as meetings and all of those boring things.

So without any solid videogame experience of my own I decided to start just from Scratch. All I had wad was previous experience as software developer, my laptop and a notebook.

This will be a series of stories as the company evolves and we’ll walk you through our game development.

I hope this story inspire you also to follow your dreams. So let’s start!

This story is the first story of a series of posts. You can follow up here:

First Story | Next Story