Wednesday 11 February 2015

Creating a Game Company: The art of multi-classing

Hello World,

Over this past year I have been working on something I couldn’t have even imagined myself doing, starting my own company. For those who aren’t regular readers, I have started a tabletop game design company by the name of Sproutli Games and we are taking our first big release to Kickstarter in a month. Within today’s blog post however I would like to share some of what I have learned whiles starting a company.

The first and most impactful thing that I have learned is that owning a company is a job of many hats. As a business owner, working on actual design work and game creation will become a much smaller portion of the time you spend on your company.   Most of the work you do will be spent doing project management, marketing and networking. While often not the most glorified work it pays off in leaps and bounds. Taking the extra time to let people know about your project, and ensuring the parties involved are on track can greatly aid your final product. Your limited design time can even be further syphoned off by processes such as legal affairs, copywriting, and building your online presence.

Another thing I would like to state is that owning a business isn’t easy. For the first few years or so you won’t be able to generate a sustainable income, meaning this is something that will have to be tackled on top of a job or school. Because of this it can often be hard to find time to work on your company. It’s easy to say “oh I have a big project due, the game can wait till tomorrow.” but this can quickly spread to a week with no progress, or even a month. This is why I commit myself to do at least one task towards my company every day. It actually reminds me of this quote:

“You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you’ve climbed a mountain.”

Truth be told, I think that is a great motivational statement for starting a business, it can be tough, and there will be times where you get lost in all of the different tasks. But in the end, if you just keep at it and do your best to deliver quality products it will all be worth it. That’s what I like to think at least.

If you have started a company or worked on a major project or game release, I would love to hear about your experiences. Please contact me using this blog’s contact form in the top right of this page. I would love to do a more in depth post about this topic in the future and would love you help in writing it.

As always, thanks for reading,

- Patrick Lapienis


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