Cape Guy

Branding and My First Bit of Outsourcing

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One of the first big challenges of setting up Cape Guy was giving it an identity. Fortunately I’d had the name in my head for a while so that wasn’t an issue. I also knew that I wanted Cape Guy to be a super hero, or at least the pretend super hero identity of a small boy, with a friendly dog called Hero. I wanted to use a comic book style but also a very friendly one.

There are many some things that I can do, unfortunately drawing isn’t one of them (yet?). You can see evidence of this below. This meant that to take the Cape Guy brand beyond a vague idea in my head I needed some assistance. That’s why I asked Jemma Kang if she could help.Continue Reading

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.Continue Reading

Hello world!

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Ey up!

After 11 years working in the AAA games industry I’ve decided to have a go at going small time. I’ve really enjoyed working on what I think are some really great games over those years.

I’m not stopping making games of course, I’m just going it alone in the big world.  I’m going to make them by myself or with other indie game devs.  This means I’m going to have to learn a lot of things including, but not limited to:

  • How to setup and run a company
  • How to manage company accounts
  • How to develop a website (both the technical side and the content itself)
  • How to use social networks effectively
  • How to concept, design and prototype games
  • How to use a whole new set of development tools professionally (Unity3D, Maya, Photoshop)
  • How to do ALL of developing a game (not just physics, gameplay, platform integration or whatever as I’ve been doing before)
  • How to get my games user tested prior to release
  • How to get a game to market eg. via Steam, The iOS App Store, PSN or whatever platform I’m targeting at the time.
  • How to market a game so people might actually buy it
  • How to outsource parts of the game artwork

That’s a lot of stuff to think about.

Fortunately, it turns out that lots of developers before me have been travelling down similar paths towards their particular games being made.Continue Reading