Boutique to Business

We like Unity3D, it's a cool thing.

Unity allows us to prototype rapidly and we've got lots of experience helping people to make their games.

We've even attempted a few games of our own.

What if we leverage that experience and come up with a series of articles about the tricky stuff like multiplayer or Real Time Strategy / Real Time Tactics unit movement?

Maybe if we open-sourced a bunch of stuff, wrote some tutorials, gain some eyeballs - that can only be a good thing, right? Maybe we can attract talent, talent to help us work on games ...

Perhaps you and I can make a game together?

Something simple ... at the very least we can bring our skills along together trying.

Interesting stuff.

Unity aside, Alex is always telling me about how great Unreal Engine is. As we speak, he's consuming video's of some dude teaching Houdini.

Unity 3D, from a publisher perspective, isn't great and it's getting worse.

The company leaks tech debt from every orifice, it's difficult to imagine how that company is run day-to-day. Constantly chasing new features while the old stuff breaks.

Every time they release a new version every asset store publisher from here to Australia rolls their eyes because projects break and they break hard. (SRP anyone?)

For that reason, we're probably going to keep our attention on LTS from now on.

We need new stuff, we're spending too much time on legacy.

But what if we got over our love affair with Unity? Could we take what we have made for Unity 3D and innovate? Turn our attention to Unreal Engine?

It's prevalent because cool things are afoot in that segment; Epic Game's Fab will drop anytime soon, replacing Sketchfab and uniting game engines under a single banner.

There's an opportunity there to make the bed before the crowd arrives.

But making CGI assets for games to put bread on the table isn't what Alex or I want ultimately. We both have ideas for games, and we even have games to finish.

We need a plan, we need structure, we need help.

All that stuff on the whiteboard pic above could work it's way onto a business plan.

More so, our prototypes need game design documents - our current skeletal design docs won't do. That's a lot of writing.

Even so, it's not enough to have a cool idea, or even a bunch of cool ideas - everyone has cool ideas, even bloody AI has cool ideas these days.

We need to leverage what we have already as well as what we want to do.

Fortunately for us, this isn't the business it was 8 years ago. We're quite well established now, so pricing the business up is easier because we have nearly 10 years of proven revenue.

So if we come to some potential investor with a list of existing projects, a shiny business plan, list of prototypes, multiple intended revenue streams, well ...

... it's not about a couple of dudes in their bedroom 'going indie' anymore, we're talking about bringing home some serious bacon.

Bacon for resources, bacon for more staff.

Damn ... You know what, this might just work.