Yvora: Starting your own Game Studio

Yvora is the brainchild of Simon Veenker, an IT world veteran who grew up in Zeeland - the south-western part of the Netherlands. A surfer and sailor in his free time, he studied industrial engineering and management and went on to travel and work in many countries. He returned to the Netherlands to pursue a longtime dream: the creation of his own game concept. 

To create a game of the scale that Simon has in mind, you need a game studio. Our plan is to chronicle the story of Simon and his company: Yvora. It’s going to be an adventure and a learning experience for the whole team at Yvora. We want to share everything we discover with other startups and the game dev community - as well as maybe making some new friends along the way!

We’re going to start out with a few questions to Simon about his motivations and dreams for Yvora...

Simon Veenker, Founder and Managing Director at Yvora.

Where did the idea for Yvora come from? How long have you been thinking about and planning to make the game?

Many years! I already had the idea of combining game play and game creation back in the days when I was studying. For a long time I thought it would be too difficult to make it happen, but after talking to some parties in the gaming industry I became convinced that it will work out!

It must have been quite a jump to switch from your previous work to game development. What drove you to make the change?

For years I worked in the IT/consultancy world, that has little affinity with game development. Although I liked the work - helping others with their IT challenges - I missed the feeling of creating something from the ground up. I already had my idea for a game concept in my head and combined with my ambition to build a product, I decided to start a Game Studio. 

No small task! It must help that you’re a project management expert - on that note, are there unique challenges associated with making games?

Game development faces similar challenges to any IT project. Within most IT projects there are countless options to reach your goal and that complexity needs to be handled well. On top of that, game development has two extra things to consider which are creativity and imagination. The best game studios know how to combine the complexity of making software with the uncertainty of creativity. 

This is the Yvora office, where the magic happens!

What kind of company do you want Yvora to be, in terms of employee experience and company culture?

I want the development of games and working for Yvora to be a meaningful experience. Developing a game is a journey that we should take as a team. That means we are not solely coding, testing and designing, but we are building a concept that is broader than just a game. So if this is a journey together, then it should be fun to do, we should be learning and we should all be proud of what we achieve. Like crawling a dungeon together, you should feel that your contribution to the concept makes a difference. 

Last question: what advice would you give to somebody hoping to make their dream game a reality?

What helps in developing software is ‘fail fast’. Learn quickly what works and what doesn’t work. Adapt and listen to whoever gives you feedback. But above all, believe in what you are doing. If you are enthusiastic, people around you will catch your vibe.

Step One: Get Informed and Inspired

The first step before anything else is to gather more information about the industry you plan on getting into. Talk to people, sharpen your ideas and make people as enthusiastic as you are! 

Step Two: Make a Plan

Once you feel like you have a handle on things and you’ve got lots of information banked up, it’s time to start making a plan. Outline your concept and make sure you know exactly what your ultimate goal is. For Yvora, Simon had a specific game concept in mind. 

Then, list everything you need for the concept to work. If you’re hoping to make a game, that’s going to include a lot of technical and art requirements for programming and visuals, but don’t forget about everything else that goes into actually getting your game out there! Assuming you’re planning to release the game and not just keep it to yourself, you need to think about what storefronts you want to be on, how you’re going to describe your game via text and visuals, and how you’re going to market it to people. Do you need investors to fund everything you need? Are you looking for a publisher?

Also make sure to consider the resources required, not just the people you’ll need. While some dev tools are free, others will need to be purchased for team members. If you want a physical office space, that’s going to cost money. Are you going to want to buy some asset packs to serve as a base for your own content? Finally, don’t forget about your most important resource: time! Everything above takes time to arrange, and you might think that making trailers and such can be done using assets you were going to make anyway with no extra cost, but the time required to put it all together is a major cost in itself. This is even more important if you’re running a one-person team and perhaps not paying yourself a direct salary - don’t forget to put a value on your time regardless! 

Step Three: Paperwork

Yep, sorry, but this is part of the process too. Register your company, and make sure all the financial details are well organized. It’ll save a lot of time later when paying taxes and dealing with other financial transactions if you document everything well and have a clear system from the get-go. 

Step Four: Find Your Dream Team

Once you have all the groundwork laid out, you can start looking for talented people to join your company. Depending on how you envisage your company, this might be limited to people living in your country, or it might be open to anyone from around the world working remotely.

Bear in mind that the design of your game can affect how hard it is to find people - in the case of Yvora, we decided that Unreal Engine was the best fit for what we wanted to do. It turned out to be relatively difficult to find Unreal programmers based in the Netherlands! In the end we were able to find some good people via LinkedIn and by hiring a recruiter.

How did you find the developers on your projects? We’d love to know if this apparent shortage of Unreal devs is Netherlands specific, or perhaps we missed a good resource for finding them? Comment below or hit us up on Twitter, and we can share your tips with the community in a future article.

Maybe you already have some people in mind, particularly if your goal is to turn a hobby project into a real business. If that’s the case, we would advise you to think carefully about what roles, responsibilities everyone will have, and what compensation each person will be receiving. A legal agreement to define all these things can help avoid acrimonious arguments later on. If you aren’t sure what are fair rates for different roles, have a look online - there are some resources out there, including things like this crowdsourced document showing wages for (mostly) UK based game dev professionals.

Step Five: Set up an Office

Note that this step is optional, at least as far as getting a physical workspace goes - offices have a lot of benefits, but also involve a lot of overhead, so make sure they’re right for you! We chose Amsterdam for the Yvora office. We’ll delve deeper into the why as part of a future article.

Right now the pandemic partially negates many of the benefits of having an office. One of the biggest advantages is the organic, unplanned moments where colleagues have a casual chat that turns into a great idea for the project. Of course, not every chat is going to result in ideas, and that’s okay! Teams will work better together if everyone is friendly and feels connected, and non-work chat can help with that.

It’s unfortunate to be starting a company during the pandemic, because it makes it harder to introduce the starting team to each other. An office is a great way to have people feel comfortable with each other, and that process requires a little more encouragement when people are working remotely. Aside from regular standups and introduction / icebreaker group calls, encourage team members to hop into voice calls when they might be able to work together on something, perhaps make a channel with music for people to hang out in during working hours if they like, and don’t be afraid to set an example. Of course every team is different, and some might get along fine with text-only communication, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Having a team that feels comfortable starting conversations with each other outside of formal meetings can help pre-empt and avoid problems, particularly issues that are on the boundary of two different disciplines (e.g. art and programming).

A final note - this probably goes without saying, but whether or not you have a physical space for your company, you do want some kind of centralized ‘office’, even if it’s a simple Discord server. It serves as a way for everyone to see who is available, provides a clear place to ask for help or feedback, and can also be the hub for team building, whether it’s chatting in a #random channel, setting up some personalized emojis or gifs, or organizing some Friday afternoon online games.

Step Six: Make your game!

With all the preparations done and your team in place, it's time to get down to work on the creative side! And being creative can be a lot easier when you know your company has a solid foundation to build from.

We’ll close out with a little teaser for our as yet unnamed (but we’re working on it) secret project. This piece of art is by Yvora’s concept artist Kevin Bastiaenen. In his words: “I like to take inspiration from real life and translate it into something more stylish and exaggerated for Yvora's world.”