Posts by Sjonsson

When I started this thread I was researching that matter, calling banks and looking for options. Then after talking to a friend of mine who does game dev startups for a living (incubation and acceleration programmes), I got to know that he had a direct contact with Kickstarter to which we've been forwarded.

He also told me some that it has been under discussion since 2011 that Kickstarter should open up to Sweden but it has never really gone anywhere, until now that is. It appeared that the discussions have finally lead somewhere and they plan to open up for Sweden around October/November, which happens to be our initially planned time frame for our campaign.

That said, we are just really lucky so far. After the researching I've done I realised that it would've been a helluva hustle with getting the taxes right and the process may have been very long and tedious - because bureaucracy and the cross-continental factor.

Least to say, it was a relief. Banana-surfing ftw!

Quote from Corwin

Sorry about the dump, but all of these would be good material. If you have access to the whole of GDC Vault, I believe there are a few premium-only lectures on the subject too.

Still doing research work on all those links as well as other material. I'm on the 15th page now of my Kickstarter bible.

Had no clue how many details there are to a campaign. Gonna publish it once it's finished.

Once again, thanks!

I might actually buy that game!

Sweet stuff!

The wetness on the street in the second last pic looks real good.

Quote from Sentura

I think most of us by now make games for mainly adults, and as such there really isn't a need for a moral filter as the onus for this is on the recipient. We create a product that people can use in whichever way they desire. What they do with it in their own living rooms or bedrooms should be none of our business whatsoever.

I agree that adults don't need the same moral filter but I sitll think that devs have a responsibility for the content in the game to some extent, you cannot just pull the 'it's just entertainment'-card on everything. Sure we shouldn't mind what people do in their bedrooms, but what about misinformation could potentially lead to prejudices? And hurt people?

One could argue that it's still up to the consumer to understand and see through the 'bad' messages of the game, yet this will not always happen, people will get things wrong and they will get prejudices. I cannot really say it's not the consumers responsibility, but do we really want our games to potentially lead to bad consequences?

Just like I want journalism not to give me a wrong idea of what middle-east is like, I sure as hell don't want Call of Duty to write arabic over their map Karachi even though arabic is not the country's language. If the games are taking place in the real world and is not meant to be alternate reality, just a series of scenarios happening in our world, I think devs have a responsibility to make it legitimate - partly for the sake of actually calling it 'real world' and party not to misinform players (no matter if they are kids or grown ups.)

Recently posted some stuff from A Mole Odyssey which our mobile game, now here's something new: the first look of gameplay on our second game, Spellsworn!

I know there's a difference between publishers and investors, but the definition I am not aware of, please enlighten me! Once again it feels as though Juniors, with all reason, will have a harder time to get funding from publishers or investors. I guess it all comes down to how good you're at presenting your strengths and make an impression.

It's Frogsong Studios, you've never heard of it since it's a start-up and we haven't released any of our games yet. It's me on Design/Ux/Scripting/PR, 2 programmers and 2 artists.

http://frogsong-studios.com/

Also we have a wip, presskit if you're curious: http://www.frogsong-studios.com/presskit/
Be ware, it haven't been corrected and polished just yet.

That makes a lot of sense, thanks! This is going to help us a lot if our Kickstarter fails, which means we're targeting publishers.

When you present a team and our strengths et cetera, what should you put a lot of effort into mentioning? Is it how well we work socially? How skilled we are? How long time we worked together? I really have no clue.

Damn, wish I could attend to more events. Need to learn moaaar!

I agree, it's an interesting subject. In terms of GDDs, what kind of layout, how much information et cetera, seems to be getting best pitch feedback?

Also, you're completely right about the article being misleading. I was making this article out of notes I took some three months ago, should've written it sooner when I had it fresh in memory. Gonna go over it a second time and see what changes I can do, wish I was good on taking names so I could quote people but I didn't, next time I'll be doing that for sure.

Thanks!

That's just a goldmine, thanks a lot! I'mma read it all!

I'm currently mashing through the series, I'm just at the first game and I already like the dialogues. I hope I can finish both games before W3 release

Hey everyone!

I attended to this years Nordic Game Conference 2014 in May where I attended something called Nordic Game Summit, there was a panel with gamebiz icons and investors as well as some mingling inbetween the sessions. Never did I write an article (beware of errors) like this before but I thought I'd give it a shot to share what I learned.

I also what to discuss these Investor/Dev Gaps that was mentioned in the panels. Does anyone here have experiences with these gaps? Dos' and 'donts?

Since the sessions focus a lot on the Nordic region I am very interested in the difference.

Quote

Nordic Game Investment

Author: Stefan Jonsson
Date: 2014-05-22

Description

This article is a compendium of the knowledge I have gained from reading, talking to other developers and game business people alike. During the Nordic Game Conference (20-23th of May, 2014) I was invited to an event called Investing in Games Summit which was the main my main inspiration for making a compilation. During the event it was thoroughly discussed what investors think about developers in the Nordic region and what they are looking for.

After the event it came clear to me that there is a gap between developers and investors in terms of communication and it is this article’s purpose to spread what I learned during the sessions; what developers can do and not do to appeal to an investor. It should also be mentioned that this article is directed towards the Nordic region, yet it may contain tips applicable for other regions.

If you have views that differentiate from this article, feel free to contact me and discuss it - I will gratefully listen. Lastly, the text may contain statements which I lack of knowledge to defend or explain.

Why the Nordic region?

During the Investing in Games Summit it was discussed whether there is a Nordic Phenomenon or not and how investors relate to the subject. It was concluded that there is indeed a phenomenon but what is it and why does it exist? Something that is seen in the Nordic is a notion of clusters where developers tend to keep a steady connection and help eachother out. One theory is that it could be related to the historical culture of supporting one another due to the cold climate and harsh winters.

Undoubtedly, there are some kind of family feelings among nordic developers and it is believed that this could be a reason to why new success stories keep appearing in this region. Some believe that when a company has a success story it invokes a confidence for success among other connected companies. Among other things nordics have in common it was stated that they tend to be honest and humble in their way of thinking and how this is different to other regions. Another difference stated was that nordic developers’ game pitches are not as impactful as other regions, that the weakness of the nordic region is the presentation of the product rather than the development and quality of the product.

Sustainability
No matter if there is a phenomenon or not, it is a fact that there are quite a few success stories happening but for how long? Are the nordics actually inside a bubble that at some point will burst and what could we do to prevent that? According to investors there are some challenges we need to overcome where one of those are taxes and further collaboration with governments. Where some countries like Canada have tax breaks or tax credits others do not where the investor stated that this plays a role in the interest of investing in a company - that the countries who has neither tax breaks nor tax credits should start a dialog with their government as soon as possible.

Furthermore, the game industry is a very iterative environment and just as there are success stories there are failures where projects go down the drain. It is important for all parts involved to learn from the failures, get up on the horse and keep on going. Investors pose that in order to have the game industry blossom we need to create a system that allows this kind of failures and it is here governments get uncomfortable. The game industry needs to make governments understand this process and accept it - which is undoubtedly a big challenge.

Investors have also posed that developers need to learn more about how business works, how to pitch a game and as a consequence become more appealing. There are gaps between investors and developers where these have to be found and bridged. A sign of these gaps are the lack of angel investors in the nordic region and it is believed that this is because they are from other industries and lack of insight.

Credits
I want to thank the following people for sharing their pool of knowledge and experiences.

Claus Lykke Jensen, Moviestar Planet

David Gardner, London Venture Partners
Lasse Seppänen, Playraven
Jarkko Paalanen, Fingersoft

Jørgen Tharaldsen, CEO Megapop

Jason Della Rocca, Execution Labs

Martin Walfisz, Gaming Startup

Nic Parker, Parker Consulting

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Quote from SpronyvanJohnson

I informed him (and others) that I changed his shifts for the entire week back to voice. I've never loved my job as much as I did today.

Hahahaha! Good on you!

Quote from dux

Tore my foreskin.

You did not... O__o

Quote from Castle

This a misnomer. I wasn't necessarily in that situation due to laziness. This was a hard lesson in what can happen if you are not very good at two very important things.

1. Selling yourself

2. Networking

I am in a situation where I spent ALL of my time working and zero of my time putting myself out there. I didn't go to the parties and meet people in my relevant industry. I didn't keep my portfolio out there and I didn't make sure to have a presence. I still suck at job interviews on top of that. So I mean, while the post I put up may incite pity to some extent, I look back on it as both a hard lesson and just how quickly you can fall out if all you spend your time on his honing your art. There is actually a time when going out to have a beer with industry people for a fun night is better than learning how to get better at what you do. I am paraphrasing but its actually true.

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Thanks for sharing that, I always think about skill level in a prestigeful way and it feels like other juniors like me tend to do the same. Definitely gonna keep that in mind.

Haha, well it has the same principle as an infinite runner game - get as long as possible and get as high score as possible. Robot Unicorn Attack did this really well.

How is a brushwork of Hurg not awesome?

And so the term "Hurg-boxing" was coined.

Some shots from A Mole Odyssey!

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Quote from Castle

I have been in the industry for so long now I dont even remember everything I worked on. I am happy to be doing what I love to do and in all honesty lately I have been more afraid that I'll end up unemployed for a long time again which was more soul crushing than working on a bad game. And I have worked on some bad games before let me tell you lol... None of it compared to having to push shopping carts at walmart while looking for work. During the interview they showed some of the games that they sold in the electronics department and one of them was Call Of Duty Black Ops and for some reason I pointed and said I worked on the first one. I am not sure why I bothered to mention it but nobody believed me anyway. None of those people were able to understand that there is a world outside of that place.

I had a guy talking during break with someone else talking about how he wanted to learn Unity but he messed around with Fallout modding. I mentioned that I worked on a couple really big mods for New Vegas. He said "Don't you push shopping carts?" I told him I had been working on games for a living for more than 10 years and he gave a sarcastic smile to his buddy like I was full of shit then continued talking about this one time he loaded up Unity.

*sigh* I'm more worried about experiencing shit like that again.

Holy shit that's a sick story, never heard anyone else had that experience before. Why the heck would you lie about working on a video game?! Gotta work harder so I don't need to push dem' carts.

Quote from Em

Let's all go indie and make our mapcorean game.

Joke aside, I would really like to start a personnal project with other people.

That's an interesting thought though, I wonder what'd happen if the full strength of mapcore went together and did something, probably some kind of universe collapse of awesomeness.

Pogo, I'm gonna mention something that might sound a bit self-explanatory, something noone have mentioned yet.

What are you doing outside of work? Are you eating enough good food? Are you sleeping enough? Are you working out? Do you eat your vitamins? etc etc...

For me, all of those things, if I don't take care about them my motivation will break down no matter what I do. My point is, maybe it's not work related at all, maybe it's something completely different, not necessarily one of the things I listed.

So what about me? I've gone straight on the indie-dev path together with four other fellas and what I've figured so far that is both good and bad about being an indie is that you really have to do a tons of things that aren't your expertise at all necessarily. Sure I do my designing part of the games but there are so many times I just find my self tweaking GUI variables, creating simple art and so on. But what I found myself doing the most, since I'm the talkative guy in the group, is a lot of management, networking and just doing all of those things that needs to be done, simply because everyone else always seem to have a high-prio task linked to their expertise (art and coding.)

I like doing that stuff at least a little, but there's nothing like just making maps and tweaking gameplay and that's what I'd always want to do it. I just don't see that happening on a really small company like ours, then again; variation is good.

Quote from penE

Loving it so far , though I'm only in for roughly one year, and the amount of bullshit was pretty low.

Guess I'm really lucky to work for Yager, too. They take really good care of their employees, and try to not crunch them to death. Even in the busy weeks before e3, there was little too no overtime involved. Great projects, flat hirarchy, you can basically work on what you feel is best for the project, all the managment gets done by the team, etc. .

Things are awesome at the moment!

Finally some good words about the AAA-studios, I've been hearing so much shit about them in terms of overtime et cetera I've lost quite a bit of interest in applying for the bigger studios. But maybe, since the game dev business is still in its infancy (in comparison to others), there will be a time when working in this industry could mean an economic security and not be as volatile.

That's a really good point Pampers. I have no clue how it can actually be an incentive to get a shirt for a game that hasn't been released yet, which can turn out to be shit or in worst case, will never see the light of day.