Cape Guy

Things to Think About Before Becoming an Indie Dev

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It’s certainly too early to say if Cape Guy will be a success, even by my quite modest definition of success. Despite this, it seems like a good idea to write down the things I did and thought about before resigning from my job and setting up Cape Guy while they are still fresh in my mind.

As with all my posts, I’m not prescribing how you should go about running or setting up your business. I’ll just be describing what seemed to work for me.

Get Into Games

I’ve spent lots of years learning how games are made, and am pretty confident I can make a game on my own. If you are not then I’d suggest working for a games company for a few years first. Any games company will do, though a larger company will expect you to specialise in a quite narrow development area whereas a smaller company will most likely require you to work in a less in depth but broader area. A smaller company is probably a better fit for an aspiring independent games developer, though I worked for three large companies (SCEE, Rocksteady and Frontier) so I think that can work too!

Games recruitment companies such as Aardvark Swift or DataScope will be able to advise you further on what jobs are available to you or what qualifications you will need. Realistically you will need a, relevant, degree level qualification and some kind of evidence that you are capable of doing the job. This is usually provided via examples of your work such as one or some of the following:

  • game design documents
  • a design critique of a game or of some games
  • a portfolio of your artwork
  • a small game prototype

It is possible to get a job without any of these, but you will need a very strong academic background and a bit more luck that you would otherwise need!

You can’t realistically know/do everything in your job though, so get used to spending at least some of your free time learning from books, blogs, online tutorials and your own mini-projects. The best games developers I have worked with pretty much all spent a significant amount of their free time broadening their games development knowledge. If you want to be a great games developer you’re going to be competing with these people, so I hope you enjoy learning! Fortunately this also includes playing games critically. Getting a real feel for what mechanics work, what features really add to the enjoyment of games.

When you are ready to go indie you can work with a business partner or outsource work, but in a very small company you are almost certainly going to be expected to be able to work in a significant number of areas e.g.

  • write or fix game code
  • create or edit art assets
  • write game design documents
  • make game design decisions
  • write game story
  • create and/or edit a website
  • create content for advertising and/or social media
  • tweak outsourced assets

If you have a few game ideas, but none of the skills to actually make a game, then unfortunately you are of little benefit to a small company. They are usually overflowing with good game ideas and short on the resources to create them, so learn as many skills as you can.

Take your Time

If you are in work (for a games company or otherwise) and thinking about setting up a games company then you are in a good position to start learning the skills you need and planning what your games company will do.

If you do currently work for a games company then your employment contract probably has clauses which claim ownership of related works, such as games you make in your free time. This is frustrating but I eventually realised that it was a blessing in disguise for me. It forced me to concentrate on learning how to create and run a business, and discovering and experimenting with the tools I would use, rather than just blindly trying to start working on a game while still at work.

Things I found useful to read/do before resigning are:

  • NESTA’s Creative Enterprise Toolkit
  • Reading Setting Up and Running a Limited Company by Robert Browning
  • Running through various tutorials for the tools I was expecting to use and not already competent with on Digital Tutors
  • Learning how to create a professional website.
  • Write a Business Plan including a cash flow estimation (to decide how much money I needed to invest in the company). I actually used this template created by The Prince’s Trust (who may also be able to help you setup your business if you are under 25 years old). Make sure you give yourself enough time and resources to make the game(s) you’re planning. An unrealistic plan will just lead to the company failing.
  • Search for an accountant for your business.
  • Decide which bank you are going to use.
  • If you are going to have multiple directors, decide how the ownership of the company will be split in advance.
  • Have a company name ready to go and check it is available.

Define What Success Means for Your Company

If you release your first game to critical acclaim and it sells several million copies then you would no doubt consider that a success. However, this is an unlikely outcome. Using it as your definition of success is unhelpful as it will more likely demoralise you early on in the life of the business when your first game, maybe, only sells a few thousand or tens of thousands of copies.

The headline story of indie developers immediately making loads of cash and being heavily featured in games magazines only happens to a few developers and of those they have often actually worked on several less successful games in the past.

For me, I wrote a massive pay cut into my business plan building up to what I consider a reasonable level of pay (but still quite a bit less than what I was earning before I left AAA development). If your main goal is to make a lot of money, don’t set up a games company. Make something else. If you consider success to be making enough money to keep doing what you love doing, then you’re in the right place. Anything over that is a bonus.

Here are some references which should get you thinking:

Plan for Success

It’s easy to try and spend as little money as possible e.g. only using free tools; doing your own accounts; making your own website. But I don’t think this is a how you plan for running a successful business.

The key is efficiency. It’s easy to mistake spending as little as possible for being as efficient as possible, but in reality there are two main resources at your disposal. They are your money and your time.

Whoever you are, your time has a value to the company. If you are leaving a job to setup a company then you can consider your (former) salary as a measure of the value of your time. Once you do, it quickly becomes apparent that you spending your time struggling to generate the necessary company accounts is far more expensive than paying a professional accountant to do that for you (especially if you get it wrong, as the fines for incorrect accounts filing can be much higher than the cost of using a professional accountant for a year).

This view extends to things like middleware:

  • Unity only costs around £50 per month to licence, so it’s hard to imagine how creating your own engine for your game (especially if it’s intended to be cross platform) could possibly be done more efficiently.
  • If you’re used to using Maya, use it for your company. Maya LT is available at a very reasonable price via Steam.

Once you’ve done a business plan with a cash flow, it should become pretty clear that the running costs of a small games company without dedicated offices are surprisingly low, even with expenses for professional tools. If you believe there is a market for the games you are trying to make, then don’t worry about spending money to get the game made as efficiently as possible.

You Will Need Some Money

Even though the running costs of a games company are relatively low, they are not zero. Even if the company was free there is still the loss in income which you will suffer to consider. Make sure you’ve planned your personal finances responsibly to match what your expecting to make through your company, with some contingency built in both in the company finances and your own.

If you do create a limited company, remember that the company is a separate legal entity from you. This means that you’ll need to get used to separating your personal and business finances.

Seek Out Advice

People love giving advice. Take advantage of that and ask as many people as you can for advice. If you know anyone who has already setup a company, ask them about it. Look online for blogs like this one. Here are a few useful sites where you can find out information:

Also, see if there are any indie developers looking for some help with a project. You may prefer to just have a go at your own project but there’s a lot to learn from people who are already doing what you want to do, and they might even pay you :-).

Have a Fallback Plan

No plan is everything-proof. Maybe your game won’t sell, maybe it will take twice as long as you expect. Perhaps that outsourced work turns out to be significantly more expensive than you expected. Whatever the reason, you might find that you run out of money. Make sure you know what you’re going to do at that point. Your main options are:

  • Close your company and go back to the day job.
  • Get another permanent job and put the company on indefinite hold.
  • Do some temporary contracting work as yourself or through your company (though if you have a limited company you’ll need to keep IR35 in mind. If you are unsure then your accountant or a solicitor will be able to help).
  • Get somebody to buy some shares in the company.

Registering a Company is Easy

Before I started investigating, I thought that the legal side of setting up a company was complicated and took a long time. This couldn’t be further from the truth. It took me about 30 minutes to register Cape Guy with Companies House via their website. Setting up a bank account took little more than visiting my bank, though it did take about 3 weeks for them to complete the process. And my accountant did most of the rest of the work.

Check You’re Still Excited

Running your own company won’t be easy and you certainly won’t enjoy everything you have to do. It will be hard and stressful. You will have to learn and do a lot of stuff you find boring. At first, there won’t even be a regular pay cheque.

In return, you will get creative control over your games and a level of freedom that you are unlikely to be given in somebody else’s company.

If this hasn’t put you off, I’ll see you on the other side!