mid_gen's Launch a Game Studio Thread

Somewhat surprisingly, of the 3 places I’ve contacted about design work. One never replied to email. One hasn’t got back to me in two weeks after a face to face meeting. The other doesn’t seem to know if they want to be a designer or a bar manager judging by their insta.

Might just try fiverr, although I’m sure that’s just people using AI mostly these days.
 
Well Fiverr is just weird, lots of obviously asian people masquerading as pretty Western girls. It's giving me the ick tbh.

Decided I'm just going to do the branding myself. I'm not completely talentless in that regard! Time to get the pen and paper out.

Also, going to be another week without a vlog. Was planning to do one today, but I have come down with turbomanflu....never had it hit me this fast before, usually just sore throat as a couple days warning first.....but this just got right into my sinuses, throat, chest in a matter of hours yesterday afternoon. Ah well.
 
There's something nasty going round, man. I've had something like that for weeks. It comes and goes, the cough is a bit relentless.

Regarding fiverr, have you considered putting the price up?
 
dirtychinchilla said:
There's something nasty going round, man. I've had something like that for weeks. It comes and goes, the cough is a bit relentless.

Regarding fiverr, have you considered putting the price up?
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Been a bit of a write off this weekend, I've had this cold which I'm just about shifting. Missus has had a horrific stomach bug as well, fun times in the household :D

I have done a bit of tarting up of the branding. I think I'll just try doing what I did with my climbing channel, just go through a few iterations until I home in on something that works. I enjoy the process to figuring out how to do new stuff, and it's nice to have some more creative work to do around the coding.

My dreams of cutting down days are getting delayed again....but I'm having to be pragmatic at the moment. Every week I do 5 days for this fintech is pretty much a month's runway for me to focus on the game studio in future....so although part of me really wants to stick it to the man and just get on with my own thing, the sensible option right now is to keep this work coming. There will come a point where I've got enough cash in the business to pay myself a sufficient salary for 12+ months at which point I could sensibly cut off that revenue stream....but not there yet.

Still, this client is super flexible, I can work where and when I want. They don't mind if I'm doing other stuff on the side as long as I deliver.....which I do, so all good. Hell if they manage to get another round of funding the day rate might get up to proper fintech levels which would be pretty good.

Whilst sitting around sniffling this weekend I have got quite a bit of housekeeping done, finished up some of the less glamorous bits of the game flow, sorted some issues in my backup system. Done some work managing the LLM guardrails to get Claude using the code styles I want.

Got the house all sorted out now, had a few DIY jobs to tidy it up before going on the market which should happen next week.

Was considering a TikTok account, but I just cba with it, so have gone for an Instagram account (will be easy enough to find). Youtube is good for long form stuff, but it's a lot of work to get something uploaded, it's nice to have a channel to just post little updates about what I'm up to....will be getting onto that this week.....and Wednesday looks like it'll finally be a good day to get out and record another vlog.
 
Well, one of the design agencies has got back to me now, will get some pricing by end of the week hopefully.

Wouldn't mind getting it done this financial year. Because I'm well into higher rate tax bracket for this year, I don't really want to pay myself any salary this FY. I'd rather keep the money in the business until next FY and I'll start paying myself just enough to pay the bills (and less income tax). Does mean that any cash that's left in the company this year is going to owe corp tax. Need to sit and run some numbers to figure out the best option.....but either way, spending some of the company's money in this FY reduces the corp tax burden.

Also finally ordered a decent studio light so I can make better videos shot indoors. Will be spending more time shooting inside, and need a better lighting setup, I do have some crappy little LED lights that work for making webcam calls better, but need a proper COB and soft box to make Youtube videos look decent, so will get that sorted this week. Got a few videos to do :

How to get a job in the games industry (blog I wrote a while ago, but in video form)
AAA dev mistakes to not make!
Prototyping tips
Various AI/Claude tips, my MCP server and stuff.
 
One for @Noxia !

The prototype is now #RTXON :cool:



The projectiles and missiles looked awful with the default temporal AA, so I've just got the DLSS plugins installed and setup. Much nicer! No more smeary trails behind everything.

Got some studio lighting delivered so just setting that up so I can shoot a vlog episode from me study, hopefully get that up today.
 
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mid_gen said:
One for @Noxia !

The prototype is now #RTXON :cool:



The projectiles and missiles looked awful with the default temporal AA, so I've just got the DLSS plugins installed and setup. Much nicer! No more smeary trails behind everything.

Got some studio lighting delivered so just setting that up so I can shoot a vlog episode from me study, hopefully get that up today.
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Love it. I volunteer to help for um, well anything. Would be interesting to see a process done from a professional POV. Not attending standups though and doing story point estimates :D
 
Noxia said:
Love it. I volunteer to help for um, well anything. Would be interesting to see a process done from a professional POV. Not attending standups though and doing story point estimates :D
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I think I'm only a few weeks away from having a playtest build to send out to get some initial feedback....will just use people on this thread for now rather than anything wider.

Finally got the vlog done. Spent the morning faffing about with new studio lights, but got there in the end.


And now....on with the game for the afternoon as the missus is away :)
 
mid_gen said:
I think I'm only a few weeks away from having a playtest build to send out to get some initial feedback....will just use people on this thread for now rather than anything wider.

Finally got the vlog done. Spent the morning faffing about with new studio lights, but got there in the end.


And now....on with the game for the afternoon as the missus is away :)
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I would not mind checking it out :)

But you defo want Noxia to take a look. He specialises in alpha testing.

Once a bit further along we can present it to the alpha testing crew in the star citizen thread. They will pay you to alpha test and I hear some will buy you pizza now and then too :p

In all seriousness thought keep up the great work.
 
Got in touch with this other design agency about branding and have a meeting with them Wednesday. Got a lot of games experience and adjacent (Warhammer stuff). Suspect they may be a bit spendy, but guess I’ll find out.
 
Really good meeting with this other design agency. CEO actually came and sat in the meeting as he’s a gamer and and seems as keen to get more game studio business as I am to get stuff done.

Gonna be a bit more spendy I think, but I’ll see when their proposal comes through.
 


Pew pew! Kinda treat myself on the weekends and let myself spend a bit of time just jazzing things up a bit, rather than just systems and knocking off tasks off the todo list. Coming along.

Although I did lose some time to Windows. I ditched OneDrive in favour of Proton Drive a while back and in the process of removing it I managed to botch my document folder registry....did spend a couple hours arsing about trying to fix it then decided I'd just reinstall.....took about about an hour to get back to a working machine. I could probably have fixed it, but my machines are pretty lightly configured these days and a reinstall doesn't take much and it just ended up being the quickest way to getting back to work.
 
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Gone for the design agency branding, kick off meeting on Thursday. Figure it will be a learning experience either way, although I don't thikn I'll be disappointed with the results, they're a decent size agency, part of me is thinking....should I really be spending this much on this right now? Oh well, at least I'll have some swish looking merch and business cards :D

Done loads on the game the last few days. Added a pause features so you can completely freeze the combat phase, added more UI, and given the player individual targeting control over each weapon system. Super janky UI right now but will tidy it up.
 
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