The blog
Studio notes.
Devlogs, what we have learned, and the occasional honest post about how this all works.
Finding Our Way North
Hello fine folks. It is I, the one most prone to self-indulgent waffle. That’s right, it’s Alex. It’s been a minute, but Allie and Phillip have done such a great job giving actual honest to goodness advice and sharing their experiences I thought it was about time I did the same. So….
Pitch Decks for Dummies vol.2
We have a joke at MVGIE about finding this mythical person who’s just roaming around, looking for us, bringing along a suitcase full of money. It’s just an imaginary thing to entertain and motivate us, but it’s not that different from reality.
Pitch Decks for Dummies vol.1
You might have heard that the most important part of a pitch deck is the content, and that it could be delivered as a text-only PDF or a simple PowerPoint template and it wouldn’t matter, as long as the content is strong. Only the first part of that sentence is true. Yes, content is the most important aspect, but saying delivery makes no difference is absolutely untrue.
Learning on the Job
Like many indie game developers, I grew up playing video games. I didn’t always think I wanted to make video games. Though I knew that it was a discipline one could pursue, it just seemed like it would be pretty difficult to pursue. In hindsight, I was right. I started playing games on consoles, but at some point moved over to computers, and that’s when I learned that you could change the game you were playing from outside the game.
Running a Studio: A Game of Hats
When you start an indie studio, or tell people that you’re thinking of starting one, you’ll be told that you ‘need to wear multiple hats’ so often that it becomes more of a cliché than words that are supposed to mean something. The idea is that you can’t just focus on your main discipline, but need to manage your business and bridge any gaps you have in your development team, too, but how do you do that? Well, this week, I take the hat metaphor too far to answer that question.
An Imposing Syndrome
Hey friendly folks, It’s been a minute, but once again it is I, Alex. I’m sure you’ve missed me, but let’s be honest Phillip and Allie have done a fine job of holding court. It’s my turn today and I’m going talk a little about something that’s really important to me, and something we’ve all struggled with at one point or another. Hell, I’m not convinced it ever truly goes away, but maybe we can all get better at noticing it and moving on anyway. Let’s get into some Imposter Syndrome.
PLAYER 1: Remote vs PLAYER 2: Office
My game dev experience started in 2020. Like many, I floated through my first year of uni doing group work in Zoom rooms, where people would randomly stop responding, and many classmates felt like whatever my mind could construct from their 2D profile pictures. Remote work was still something most institutions and companies didn’t quite know how to handle.
Resilience and the Challenge of Feedback
Around a year and a half after we had started MVGIE, we had perhaps our worst month as a company, and it only got worse from there. We faced three rejections in the same month. We didn’t get the two grants we had applied for, nor were we able to go to the Game Finance Market, which we had been so focused on. It was very disheartening at the time, as we had been mostly operating part-time on the game, and any one of these things happening would have been a path for us to go full-time.
An Office, a Water Bottle, and Crippling Anxiety
You wake up in the middle of the night after a night out drinking too much and realize you’re absolutely parched. You reach for the water bottle on your bedside table and are hit with a horrifying discovery: the bottle’s empty. What to do? The kitchen tap looks so incredibly far. Those few feet might as well be a miles right now. You’re still half drunk, yet half hungover already; you have a Plague Inc. deadly combo of headache and nausea, and everything is shit. So, you get pissed at your former self for not refilling the bottle, and anticipate how pissed your future self will be for not simply getting up now, yet… you go back to sleep. Against all better judgment, you just go back to sleep, clicking the snooze button on all current negative feelings, because no matter how thirsty you are, you just don’t think you can manage getting up.
Compel and be Compelled
Hi all, this is the producer, Phillip, speaking. My schedule says I have to write a blog post now, so I’ve taken off my programmer cap and put on my producer hat for the occasion. Today, we’re covering the topic of funding, designing the game to be fundable, and attempting to avoid abject failure. Just the essentials, really.
It’s Dangerous To Go Alone
You’re Stuck With Me… Again. Somewhat ironic that the topic of this weeks vernacular meander is community when you’re once again stuck with me. That’s right folks, it’s Alex. Originally, Phillip was going to write this week’s post, but in a delicious turn of events he’s behind on his work, and I am not. Anyone that knows us will immediately understand how frustrating and out of character that is for Phillip. They’ll also understand how much worse my putting it on a public platform will make it… for him. Before I could ask Allie if she wanted to do it, she made herself as small as she possibly could and hid behind her monitors. So, here I am.
Do As We Don’t…
You know what’s really annoying about making video games? There’s no actual concrete ‘how to’ or step-by-step. Sure, there are resources everywhere, university courses, internships and myriad YouTube tutorials (some of them excellent, and some of them not so excellent), but it can be overwhelming and often contradictory. There’s also the ‘ol’ thorn in the side’ of new developers where the games industry itself still is so shrouded in mystery that it can often feel like you’re venturing into some secretive underworld of spy craft, when really, all we need is a little more transparency and insight from other people’s personal experiences. So, guess what we’re going to do? We’re going to give you another not-a-guide. Isn’t that exciting? No? Well, read it anyway. Please and thank you.