GCG Feature: 'Blood, Sweat, Tears, And A Company'

It takes more than just dedication to get a game on the market -- it takes a company. GameCareerGuide.com today posted a new feature, "Blood, Sweat, Tears, and a Company: What it Takes to Make a Game" from start-up Faramix Enterprises LLC about its quest to get its first game signed. In this excerpt, founder Michael Dehen lays out why having a company bears weight in the game development industry and shares some examples of the workload he and his team have had to complete: “Last September I wrote and developed a video game that I fell in love with, and started researching how to get it made or sell the intellectual property. After further schooling and research, no publisher I could find was looking to buy an IP or license it to develop either -- it's too high a risk. They're looking for other companies to invest in, potentially by the millions, to make sure the game gets made on time and within budget, and that the risk on investment isn't too great. So I decided to start my own game company, Faramix Enterprises LLC, because I realized that starting a real company was the only viable way to get my video game on the market. What I want to share with others is a true sense of what it takes to start a company and make a game. Beyond what you read in the postmortems of games from established studios, building a game and starting a company require deep personal sacrifices. … As of now, we have a few weeks left before having some in-person meetings with publishers. We're using this time to make small changes to improve what we've already completed -- so the work is never done. Even for a small demo, it took extremely tight coordination to finish in time. While I was writing out the designs and flow of the level, we had already started working on the music composition, menu layout, and controls. I finished the level designs in a few days and moved on to working with the environment artist to get the designs visually mapped out. We also finished concept drawings so the object and environment modelers knew the color schemes of textures and the different sizes of objects. Within the first month of building the demo, we had the environment and objects modeled, but not yet textured, and our first official build was run through, testing the menu system and finalizing the GUI. We spent all of September texturing environments and objects, and putting the pieces of the demo together. This included placing objects, setting triggers, creating AI paths and spawns, developing the background skybox, and even lighting the scenes. Granted this is a simplified version of every detail we completed and the timeline, but it should give you a basic idea of how much there is to do.” You can now read the full article on GameCareerGuide.com.