mid_gen's Launch a Game Studio Thread

A2Z said:
Can't help but feel you are going to need a lot, and I mean a lot of money to actually make some sort of return on the investment if ever, let alone get everything up and running.

Respect for giving it a go though, good luck.
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I'm not trying to make a return on investment, because I haven't invested anything. The aim is to create a self-sustaining business, not just burn a load of money trying to ship a game :)

I'm undecided so far when/if I will focus full time on developing my own titles. I may carry on bringing in fintech money and just outsource much of the development and build the studio that way, doing the coding work in my free time. Maybe I'll end up doing bits and pieces of game dev contract work here and there to keep things ticking over.....or maybe I will just go full-time trying to get a title out the door myself. I'm pretty flexible.

I very deliberately live a frugal lifestyle, no debts, no monthly outgoings other than a modest mortgage. Gives me the flexibility to take on an enterprise like this without gambling my retirement on it.
 
I can remember how to do a 'hello' world in C++ on MS Visual C++ 6.0, DM me and we can talk about how to split any profits.

Seriously though good luck with it, I found my enjoyment playing games did not translate to making them, though now I don't enjoy playing them much. Arguably its easier than ever now to actually ship a game, but perhaps harder than ever to get noticed because of that.

I do sometimes get a wee bit of inspiration and I jot random things down I dream up or think would be cool in a game. If I were to ever pursue making one, it would be one I'd want to play if I saw it, and I'd treat any financial input to it as a write-off. I do wonder if I'm arguably in the best position ever to do so as I have (albeit not game) a fair bit of digital product delivery xp for some far reaching apps and services with unique challenges, and have picked up a fair bit of tech knowledge along the way due to integrating myself into some of the dev teams and getting stuck in. I think my tech skills are probably the least important factor when I think about it holistically. Anyway, it's not about me, and I certainly have no desire to move from my current field, especially with the state of the world right now.
 
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Thread watched - really interested to follow along. This is the first thread title that tempted me into this part of the forum, so well done!

All I can say is good luck and good on you for giving it a go. Sounds like you've got the infrastructure side more or less sorted already. Hopefully that first simple game idea comes easy and you'll be off and running.
 
Noxia said:
I can remember how to do a 'hello' world in C++ on MS Visual C++ 6.0, DM me and we can talk about how to split any profits.

Seriously though good luck with it, I found my enjoyment playing games did not translate to making them, though now I don't enjoy playing them much. Arguably its easier than ever now to actually ship a game, but perhaps harder than ever to get noticed because of that.

I do sometimes get a wee bit of inspiration and I jot random things down I dream up or think would be cool in a game. If I were to ever pursue making one, it would be one I'd want to play if I saw it, and I'd treat any financial input to it as a write-off. I do wonder if I'm arguably in the best position ever to do so as I have (albeit not game) a fair bit of digital product delivery xp for some far reaching apps and services with unique challenges, and have picked up a fair bit of tech knowledge along the way due to integrating myself into some of the dev teams and getting stuck in. I think my tech skills are probably the least important factor when I think about it holistically. Anyway, it's not about me, and I certainly have no desire to move from my current field, especially with the state of the world right now.
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petridish said:
Thread watched - really interested to follow along. This is the first thread title that tempted me into this part of the forum, so well done!

All I can say is good luck and good on you for giving it a go. Sounds like you've got the infrastructure side more or less sorted already. Hopefully that first simple game idea comes easy and you'll be off and running.
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Cheers all!

Have got to a point now where I've done a lot of the tech and admin work, after an extremely busy year, I need to give myself a bit of time and headspace to just work out some designs. I have a main one in mind at the moment.....to give a flavour....

A bit RimWorld
A bit Faster Than Light
A bit The Outer Wilds

It's a scope I think is manageable, systems heavy which suits me as a programmer.

But I need to flesh out the concept a bit more. I think what I'll do is in the new year, get a Discord set up and invite people from here to join. Managing the marketing and building an audience is going to be key to success....I'm a little undecided how 'open' to be about the process. At first I think I'd be happy with a closed group from here (and some other devs I'm working with).

Speaking of other devs, I've just been put in touch with a concept artist by another of our little indie collective, and they're mad about moths, so going to get them to come up with some logo ideas :)

And now, I also need to give myself a bit of a break and play some games and have some time off!
 
mid_gen said:
Managing the marketing and building an audience is going to be key to success....
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Not sure how hot you are on this stuff, but if you're not I think Chris Zakowski's How to Market a Game course is pretty good for folk like us. Although I've not got to the point of trying it anger just yet.

mid_gen said:
I'm a little undecided how 'open' to be about the process. At first I think I'd be happy with a closed group from here (and some other devs I'm working with).
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IMO, it's better to be open than not, but creating actual full-on dev logs and things is way more effort than anything you get back from it.
 
Mr Jack said:
Not sure how hot you are on this stuff, but if you're not I think Chris Zakowski's How to Market a Game course is pretty good for folk like us. Although I've not got to the point of trying it anger just yet.
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Not see his stuff before, will take a look, ta!
Mr Jack said:
IMO, it's better to be open than not, but creating actual full-on dev logs and things is way more effort than anything you get back from it.
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I wouldn't be sinking loads of time into editing or anything. Half tempted to get some Meta rayban's and just randomly stream stuff, seems to be the way the yoof are doing things now, less curated, more just real stuff. Be kinda hard while I'm still doing fintech day to day.

Had a chat with my artist who is super keen, realised I worked with her at Rare briefly before the Covid times started!

Been fleshing out my prototype high-level design....think it's coming together into something that makes sense as a) interesting and b) achievable. Prototype codename is 'Delve'. Might mean something to Ian M Banks fans :P
 
Just done tour of the coworking space in Notts, pretty cool, will definitely start doing a day a week there in the new year. Realise how much I’ve missed a bit of human interaction in my work days!

Even the permanent resident rates are pretty reasonable.
 
Wanted to do a video for my climbing YouTube channel to wrap up the year, was going to shoot it in my study as usual, but the weather was so good I just went out for a walk and shot it with my DJI Osmo instead of faffing about with the tripod and lighting at home.

It’s actually much easier to walk and talk, rather than just stand in my office and talk into an SLR lens….quite enjoyed it actually.

Given me an idea to start vlogging my studio journey. Never going to hurt having another revenue stream if it gets popular either. I could quite enjoy pontificating about my take on games, the industry, AI and other subjects, do a weekly Q&A etc, updates on the projects.
 
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mid_gen said:
Given me an idea to start vlogging my studio journey. Never going to hurt having another revenue stream if it gets popular either. I could quite enjoy pontificating about my take on games, the industry, AI and other subjects, do a weekly Q&A etc, updates on the projects.
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I think that is going to be key these days for your main revenue stream too FWIW. It seems to increasingly be the case for indy app developers - obviously many apps are typically rather less complicated than modern games and so perhaps there's more of a saturation issue there where having an audience built up organically turns out to have been vital to an apps success. Others spam TikTok/instagram with multiple accounts running slop content to promote.

Building up an audience/following organically is the more resilient path if you're able to get some traction there and so perhaps regular updates is the way to go - as in it doesn't need to be the result of creative suggestions here but literally just progress updates very regularly, bit about yourself, how you used to work in games and are now trying this journey on your own and of course a bit about the intended game.

If this is a complicated project that might take a year+ then that may well give you time to have built up an audience pre-launch. The obvious threat here is from GenAI, not just people say vibe coding games with the existing tools* but say the likes of Elon/xAI opening a games lab (how much customisation/user generated input is he planning to offer) or indeed some other startups - there are various companies out there making it super easy for people to launch apps and there's that risk that games development gets slopified so to speak.

But if you've got a professional quality game then the product itself ought to still have the potential to stand out among the possible (future) slop albeit the audience you build up before launch will presumably be even more important for that initial momentum. reviews etc.. having a small community of users on day 1 could make a huge difference.
 
Well it's been nice to switch off a little over Christmas, I've had some time to document my prototype designs a bit more....which now number 3 in total.

The third one is the simplest I've come up with and I'm pretty confident now I'll be going with this as my first build. There's no scary technical challenges, the core loops are clear, the art side is manageable.

What is it? Well I want to manage the reveal in time....but for a flavour : Faster Than Light is one of my favourite indie games, but I always felt the core combat gameplay was pretty uninspiring. I'm a big sci-fi nerd and particularly 'harder' sci-fi that is a bit more realistic about how combat in space would play out, particularly with close to light speed travel. FTL Meets Homeworld wouldn't be a million miles away, but the but the core of it is a really juicy and satisfying combat mechanic....and I mean 'juice' in the gamedev sense of a feature with a real audio-visual WOW factor to it.

More than that, I've been thinking more and more about how I can build a social media following around the studio. Got the YouTube and TikTok channels. YouTube is definitely going to be my main channel, with various threads :
  • Weekly Vlog - Update on progress in the week. This is everything about the process of building the studio, including the admin, legal, tech, people. Probably a walk and talk.
  • Opinion Pieces - My hot takes on the game dev and games industry topics du jour.
  • Q&A - Ask a dev
I've been looking around and think there's definitely a bit of a niche for games industry chat from an industry insider that isn't just **** takes and clickbait. Can only try! I enjoyed the process of building my climbing channel, and think the market ceiling is a lot higher for game content, so will be an interesting challenge to see if I can get it monetised and start bringing in revenue to fund the prototype development.

It will necessarily start pretty rough, will just have to put placeholder branding up, my artist isn't going be free until February.....but that's all part of the journey.

My contract fintech work is set to get pretty busy straight off the bat in the new year so it's going to be pretty full on juggling it all, but will be good to get stuck in.
 
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mid_gen said:
Well it's been nice to switch off a little over Christmas, I've had some time to document my prototype designs a bit more....which now number 3 in total.

The third one is the simplest I've come up with and I'm pretty confident now I'll be going with this as my first build. There's no scary technical challenges, the core loops are clear, the art side is manageable.

What is it? Well I want to manage the reveal in time....but for a flavour : Faster Than Light is one of my favourite indie games, but I always felt the core combat gameplay was pretty uninspiring. I'm a big sci-fi nerd and particularly 'harder' sci-fi that is a bit more realistic about how combat in space would play out, particularly with close to light speed travel. FTL Meets Homeward wouldn't be a million miles away, but the but the core of it is a really juicy and satisfying combat mechanic....and I mean 'juice' in the gamedev sense of a feature with a real audio-visual WOW factor to it.

More than that, I've been thinking more and more about how I can build a social media following around the studio. Got the YouTube and TikTok channels. YouTube is definitely going to be my main channel, with various threads :
  • Weekly Vlog - Update on progress in the week. This is everything about the process of building the studio, including the admin, legal, tech, people. Probably a walk and talk.
  • Opinion Pieces - My hot takes on the game dev and games industry topics du jour.
  • Q&A - Ask a dev
I've been looking around and think there's definitely a bit of a niche for games industry chat from an industry insider that isn't just **** takes and clickbait. Can only try! I enjoyed the process of building my climbing channel, and think the market ceiling is a lot higher for game content, so will be an interesting challenge to see if I can get it monetised and start bringing in revenue to fund the prototype development.

It will necessarily start pretty rough, will just have to put placeholder branding up, my artist isn't going be free until February.....but that's all part of the journey.

My contract fintech work is set to get pretty busy straight off the bat in the new year so it's going to be pretty full on juggling it all, but will be good to get stuck in.
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Sounds like something I would buy :D
 
Thread watched - really interested to follow along

just don't overwhelm your self and make sure to break it down to manageable chunk of work/phases. you have a lot there you want to do and there are lots of hidden systems all intertwined in the games let alone coding ect.

update your main post with the YouTube channel at some point please, so we can easily find it. you can get a lot of traction from Reddit also, given how huge the number of people use it is.

considering were tech is headed over the next few years designing for lower end spec may be a boon to you.

looking forward to watching this unfold.
 
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LostCorpse said:
Thread watched - really interested to follow along

just don't overwhelm your self and make sure to break it down to manageable chunk of work/phases. you have a lot there you want to do and there are lots of hidden systems all intertwined in the games let alone coding ect.

update your main post with the YouTube channel at some point please, so we can easily find it. you can get a lot of traction from Reddit also, given how huge the number of people use it is.

considering were tech is headed over the next few years designing for lower end spec may be a boon to you.

looking forward to watching this unfold.
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Definitely pacing myself, and I'm well aware of the complexity in shipping something :)

First working day of 2026, first day billing through the new studio, so good to get the ball rolling so to speak. Sorted out my professional indemnity, employer's liability, public liability insurance.

Still chipping away at my design for the FTL/Homeworld games - codename Subliminal.

Got to wait a while for my artist to be available for getting my studio branding sorted....no rush there.

Will get a first vlog up some time this week and just get that going, the channel will be rough at first but that's all part of the process, be good to get back on the Youtube bandwagon.

Going to spend some time building a roadmap framework to help break down the next few months work so I can make best use of my time.

First big decision is when do I cut back from full-time work on this fintech contract. I think I want to at least cut down to 4 days a week in February otherwise I'm just going to burn myself out trying to do everything at the same time.
 
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Just saw this thread. I don't often read this section.

I'm a self taught programmer with a keen interest in game development. Very interested in following along.
 
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