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Last week I talked about what we doing this year.

This week, I’m going to talk about some of the hurdles that we have identified, and that are going to make it difficult for us to achieve the goals we have set for ourselves.

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First of all, we are a fledgling group of game developers without any experience at running a development company or in developing a product for release. Up to this point, the lion’s share of our development has been done in a class environment, and directed by university course requirements.

That has now ended. We are operating entirely under our own steam, and don’t have to answer to anyone. In addition, we have lost access to a lot of the resources that we had through uni. This includes rooms, computers, software and support services.

This hasn’t caused any significant problems to date, but it’s going to take extra effort by the whole team to make sure we stay focused and on track, and don’t let things slip just because no-one else is keeping an eye on us.

Following on from that, there are a bunch of other problems that come along with being a new development team.

We don’t have any money. So we can’t rent any office space to develop in and we can’t pay ourselves while we develop. And because we can’t afford to pay ourselves, we also can’t afford to not have other jobs (bills still need paying, yo), and that takes a significant amount of potential development time away.

So now we are reduced to doing development in our reduced spare time, and having to meet up whenever we can manage, at whatever place we can find that can fit us in.

Add to that, we are brand new to this, so there is a very good chance that there are a number of things that we don’t even know about yet.

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Hmm, yeah sorry. Not a particularly cheery post this week. (Actually, I did a bit of a trawl through the older posts in the last week, and MAN, those first few weeks were miserable! It’s hard to remember a time when I felt that bad about what we were working on.)

On the brighter side, we are at least aware of these issues, and doing our best to address them as best we can, with the resources available to us.

All we can really do at this point is our best. Accept that we are going to make mistakes, and that this is going to be a hard slog over the course of the year as we try to make this pretty good demo that we have into a great game that thousands (millions?) of people are going to want to buy.

It’s not much fun to take a look at all of the problems that you are facing and just accept that they are going to be problems, but I think it’s better to do that than to bury our heads in the sand and just trust that it’s all going to work out.

Tune in next week for more of these super fun happy times!

So it occurs to me that I haven’t really laid out what’s going to be happening for Level Squared in 2018 so far.

Let’s do that now…

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There’s really not a whole lot to show off visually at the moment. We are continuing to work on Level Squared, with the aim of working it up to a full release. We’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes, where and when we can.

We’re having to make working on Level Squared fit in with everything else we are already committed to as well, working, uni, family life etc. None of us are getting paid to work on the game at the moment, so that’s having a bit of an impact on our ability to dedicate a huge amount of time.

Some of the work that has been done so far includes:

• A pretty drastic overhaul and refactoring of the majority of our code base. A lot of the systems and mechanics that we had created were fit for purpose with a small demo for PAX, but they weren’t going to be able to be extended to a full length game, or were going to interfere with other systems.
• Developing and writing a proper narrative for the game. There were hints of a narrative in the PAX demo, and a mood was set, but there wasn’t exactly what you would call a full emotional arc.
• Reviewing the art and aesthetics.  Our overall aesthetic was devised in pretty short order, and kept deliberately simple and able to be scaled. But it’s clear that our art style is going to become dull and repetitive over a full length game, so we are reworking it to introduce a bit more variety and distinction. There is also some work to do to better reflect the game’s new narrative.
• And finally, there has been a lot of work going on outside of the game getting various studio things set up and established.

Sorry if some of that is a bit vague. There’s stuff happening, but it’s not really in a position to make public yet.

Hopefully we will have some more substantial news to share in the near future. Until then, I’ll have to keep being vague and mysterious…

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Unfortunately, we’re not going to be heading to GDC this year.

Sorry to disappoint all our legions of international fans, but as a fledgling studio with a total operating budget of $0 we can’t afford to get over there, as much as we would have liked to.

But I know of plenty of people who are heading over, and I’ll be scanning twitter pretty obsessively to keep up with all the goings on!

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And speaking of twitter – keep an eye out, cos I’m gonna have a pretty banging image for the coming screenshot Saturday!

Over the last month I’ve been doing a bunch of research into business structures and the various advantages and disadvantages of different structures.

Here is a very quick rundown of what I have learned.

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Disclaimer #1: I am not a lawyer. All of this is based on my reading and is my understanding. Please do your own research and/or speak to a qualified professional before making any decisions about forming a business.

Disclaimer #2: I am more than happy to be corrected on any of the information below. As I said, I’m learning this, so will likely make a couple of mistakes. Happy to have a discussion any time.

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Different business structures:

Partnership

Advantages: 

• Simple to set up
• Simple to maintain
• Simple to dissolve
• Shared control within a group

Disadvantages:

• All members liable for costs (if in debt, all members can be sued)
• Minimal legal protection
• Partnership is not a legal entity. Cannot sign contracts.
• IP is owned by individual members.

A partnership is a structure made up of a group of individuals who carry out business together.

It is a relatively simple structure to set up and to register. It doesn’t require any particular compliance reporting or official documentation beyond registering with ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission).

However, all members of a partnership can be held liable for any debts that the partnership accrues and each member of the partnership remains a separate legal entity. For this reason, entering into contracts or agreements can be more difficult.

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Company

Advantages:

• A separate legal entity – can enter contracts
• Limited liability – shareholders are not liable for debts incurred by the company
• IP is owned by the company rather than individuals.

Disadvantages:

• A more complex structure to set up and to run
• Higher set up and running costs
• Requires filling certain specific roles.

While a company is a more complex structure to set up and maintain, the advantages of being able to act as a separate legal entity and the legal protections afforded by the structure mean that it is usually the better option for starting a business. A company offers legal protection to owners and can also act as an entity that is able to enter into contracts. A company needs to prepare annual financial reports, and there are a number of reports, such as a shareholder register and meeting minutes, that need to be kept up-to-date and be available to view by shareholders. 

Within a company there are a number of roles that must be filled.

Shareholders or Members: These are the owners of the company. They may have a financial stake in the company, and will earn a share of the companies profits. In the event that the business becomes insolvent, shareholders’ liability is limited to the value of their share in the company.

Director: This is the person who is charged with the day to day operation of the business. They are appointed by the shareholders. There must be at least one director. The director(s) are responsible for ensuring that the company operates within the law, keeps up-to-date records and prepares financial statements as required. In the event that the company operates while insolvent (ie, has debts that it cannot pay off) then the directors can be held liable for any outstanding debts. This means that a director can be sued for their own assets, outside of their stake in the business.

There are also some restrictions on who can be a director. You must be over 18 years old, and not be or have been bankrupt or convicted of certain charges such as fraud.

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Check out business.gov.au for some really great, entry level information. While I have been speaking with professionals, I spent a lot of time reading through info on this site before making contact. It was super helpful in getting me up to speed and making me feel more confident in speaking with people about what we needed. 

Hi folks. Sorry for the extended break over summer. I took a couple of weeks off, then found it a bit tough to get back into the groove. But schools is back now and the traffic is back to terrible in the morning, so I suppose it’s about time that I pulled myself together and got back to posting these.

There’s not a whole lot of news on the Level Squared front at the moment – I might have something in the next few weeks, but for the time being we’re keeping our heads down and getting stuff done.

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But, one thing I do want to talk about is Global Game Jam!

For anyone not in the know, a game jam is an event where people get together to make a game. They can be limited by theme, or time, or materials or locations, or nothing at all. It’s sort of a risk free opportunity to throw something together, and see if it works, and also to meet and maybe work with a bunch of new people.

Global Game Jam (GGJ) is distinguished by the fact that it is held simultaneously in a bunch of countries all around the world (the hint is in the name…). It has a specified theme and a hard time limit of 48 hours.

The theme this year was Transmission.

Our team decided to get out of the building to do our brainstorming session. There was going to be plenty of time spent in there over the next couple of days anyway! So we headed off to the pub for a couple of hours of hard thinking.

The idea that we came up with revolved around the concept of sending social media posts using a language that you did not understand. From that we built up a story about an astronaut sending out messages to surrounding planets and only knowing if they were saying good or bad things by the reactions of the planets.

And with our concept in hand, we returned to the site and get down to work.

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I took on the roles of designer and producer, roles that I feel a lot more confident putting my hand up for after a couple of years at uni. Usually I have a lot of work to do early in the project, then run around putting out spot fires and dealing with emergencies as they crop up. But this time the team I was with were pretty much on top of everything. Once the initial design was worked out I wrote up a Design Document and helped out with keeping track of where everything was.

I had our official Global Game Jam page all built and ready to go well before we were due to upload. Our task list was well in hand (even if the art team and the programming team wanted to use it in different ways…), and there weren’t any overflow tasks that needed dealing with.

At times I felt a little superfluous even.

So in the end our game was built and uploaded on time without too much panic or wailing.

And the game we made was LonelyAstronaut95.

You can play it in your web browser right here: danscode.net/LonelyAstronaut/

Or you can download a version from here: danscode.net/LonelyAstronaut95.zip

OR you could come along to the Arcade tonight from 6pm and play this as well as around 30 other games that were made at the jam.

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It’s good to be back and writing again. There’s going to be a lot of learning this year, so there’s going to be plenty for me to discuss.

Hope you all stick around.

I’m going to do a bit of a recap of this year’s highlights this week. Nothing too in depth or intense, just a quick fly-over so everything is written down in the one place.

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This time last year, I had learned a little bit of programming and worked out how to play around in Unity a little. I’d been studying Games and Interactivity at Swinburne for two years and had made a few small game prototypes mainly for assignments.

So 2017 was a pretty big challenge. We were tasked with making a game that would be played at PAX Australia. We had 30 weeks (2 semesters of 12 weeks each and a six week break between).

We formed a group with some friends made over the last couple of years, and some new friends and got down to work.

On any honest assessment, first semester was not successful. We took a long time to come up with an idea to develop, and even longer to get any sort of working prototype. We struggled to have playable versions of our games for play testing sessions, the roles within the team were undefined and we didn’t have a clear vision for what we wanted our game to be.

Our game had a strong theme and aesthetic, and we had a great soundtrack made for us. But we were never able to make fun game play.

Now, I’m can’t really say whether we had a bad idea, or we had poor execution, or if we just ran a poor process. To be honest, there were probably elements of all three at play.

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Heading into the mid-semester break, we were feeling pretty down. no-one was really satisfied with where we were as a team but at the same time, no-one really knew what we should be doing to improve.

It seems like a fairly easy decision now, looking back, but at the time this was super risky. While our game wasn’t as good as we had hoped, there was a good chunk of work that had gone into it. Starting over would put us at least 12 weeks behind the other teams, and potentially leave us with another game that was just as problematic as the one we already had.

There was a lot of discussion about whether we were doing the right thing, and there was a good argument made that if we kept working on FourShadow we could drag it into a better shape. And that may well have been true.

None the less, the decision was made to at least explore what else we could do. Knowing that we had little time, we thrashed out some quick and dirty prototypes, then worked out what we could make out of them. We selected a nifty projection mechanic as our central mechanic, and went from there.

This was about the point that I started writing this blog, so you can go back to the start and get a week-by-week breakdown of the process that we went through, but to TL:DR it, we abandoned FourShadow and started a new game – LVL²!

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A team of four of us built that projection mechanic into a prototype that could be play tested at the end of the mid-year break, and that became the game that we worked on over the remainder of the year.

Beyond the decision to start over, we also got a lot better at planning and working as a team. We mapped out our entire semester, set hard due dates for development and planned for a series of play tests.

And it all paid off in the end. We had a great PAX, we met a bunch of people, there was really good buzz around the game. And the year was capped off in frankly stunning fashion with our nomination and win at the Game Awards.

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So we go into the summer break with a nifty little prototype under our wings, a whole lot of international buzz, and quite a few questions about what we are going to do next.

This is going to be the final post for the year. I’ll be on the road a bit over the xmas period, so won’t have time to write. I’ll be back in January with more in the on-going saga of the development of LVL²!

Many of you will have seen the news by now, but for anyone who hasn’t:

That’s right, Level Squared was awarded Best Student Game at the Game Awards!

And there has been a very slight increase in our site traffic following that…

(see if you can pick the day the Game Awards were broadcast).

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One of our team members, Steve, was there to collect the award and give a pretty spectacular speech as well, with a few well-deserved shout-outs.

However, he was pretty limited in the time he had, so I’ll expand a bit on what he got to say. Level Squared would not be the game it is today without the assistance of these people:

Andy Trevillian. Andy has been our teacher throughout this year. He’s given us a huge amount of support and guidance and had our backs the entire year. Back when we were working on FourShadow he did his best to get us to pull it into some sort of playable format. Sadly this was beyond even his formidable abilities. But he didn’t give up on us, even meeting with us over the break to discuss where we were at and to encourage us to consider where we were and what we could achieve. When we made the decision to reboot, Andy warned us that we were up for twice the work in half the time, but he backed up our decision.

Joe Park, Laura Voss and Ken Wong. Joe, Laura and Ken were our tutors across the two semesters. They have all built studios and released games, so brought a wealth of knowledge to help us out. They gave us priceless advice on running our projects and designing our game, and were willing to talk to us about whatever problems or hurdles we were encountering.

Swinburne Games Staff. Steve Conway, Laura Crawford, Troy Innocent, Dan Draper, Mark Morrison, David Harris and all the other teachers and tutors we’ve had over our time at Swinburne. All the staff have been super supportive and encouraging and have helped us to learn and grow.

The Arcade. This goes out to both the venue for giving us a space to develop, and to everyone at the Arcade who played Level Squared, or were willing to talk to us when they ran into us. The community at the Arcade were super supportive and encouraging to all of us, and really made us feel welcomed into the Melbourne development community.

Bar SK. Louie and Dayve at Bar SK hosted Level Squared at two Work in Progress Wednesdays, giving us the opportunity to show Level Squared to a heap of new players and helping us to play test. I took pages and pages of notes at these play tests, and they definitely helped Level Squared to be a better game. They also serve really nice beer. And while that didn’t directly help develop the game, I enjoyed it a lot.

IGDA. Likewise, everyone who played Level Squared at an IGDA Melbourne meetup. These was some of the hardest crowds that we tested with, being made up of developers who knew how to stress test and break a game. It was great to track the development of Level Squared month to month as it became more and more difficult to break!

Everyone who has played Level Squared. Every time someone played Level Squared we took notes and made improvements. If you ever played Level Squared, thank you for helping us.

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I’ve spent the last few weeks explaining what we are planning to do now that uni has finished, and what our plans are for Level Squared.

And, well, all of those decisions have been rendered obsolete now.

We’re going to have to get back together in the coming week and reevaluate all over again, now that we have a much greater profile and some pretty hefty industry endorsement.

So I guess the good news is that there’s going to be more posts in this series! Stay tuned for the on-going barely contained chaos that has been and will continue to be the development of Level Squared!

Yep, you saw the title up there, nothing to report this week. Nope nothing at all…

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Unless you count being nominated for the Best Student Game Award at the Game Awards as something worth talking about of course!

The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony that recognises game creators and publishers. Games are usually nominated by a pool of journalists, with awards decided by popular vote.

This is the first year that there has been a Best Student Game Award. We submitted Level Squared for consideration in early November via an online application portal. We included our trailer and links to our presskit and website, as well as details about the development team.

And I guess they saw something in there that they liked, cos I found out when I woke up on Wednesday morning that we had been nominated!

There are five other really cools games nominated as well, from all over the world. It’s unbelievably cool to be up for consideration with all these great games from so many different places.

Best Student Game is not decided by popular vote. Instead it is decided by a panel of judges.

These judges:

HolyshitHideoKojimaandToddHowardandKimSwiftaregonnaplayourgame!

*ahem*

So, yeah, that’s about all that happened this week.

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I was planning to talk about the games I was making over the summer break, but I guess that will have to wait for a couple of weeks until this is over.

Anyway, here’s a selection of links to pages where Level Squared (a game I worked on) is mentioned alongside games like Super Mario Odessey, Horizon: Zero Dawn, PUBG, Breath of the Wild and Destiny 2:

• Polygon
• VG24/7
• Gamespot
• Venturebeat
• Den of Geek
• Wikipedia
• The Game Awards

First of all, apologies for leaving you all hanging last week. I hope you’ve managed to get through the last few days without any great stress.

Today’s hot topic: What are we going to do with Level Squared?

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One question I was asked a lot over the course of Games Week was what we were planning to do with Level Squared after PAX?

All of our planning and focus had been on getting the game ready for PAX and we had given very little thought to what we wanted to do next.

No, that’s not quite true. We had deliberaly avoiding talking or thinking about what we wanted to do next.

There were a couple of reasons for this.

Getting ready for PAX was a big ask. Especially for us, seeing as we had scrapped everything and started over in July. We didn’t want to entertain any longer term thinking that could potentially open up development paths that we didn’t have the scope to explore in the limited time that we had.

We also wanted to avoid any potential avenues of argument or discontent. The decision of what to do after PAX was likly to lead to some disagreement, so it was best to keep it out of the way until PAX was over.

And lastly – there was a good chance that PAX was going to give us our answer anyway. However we felt going into the show was very likely to be changed by the public’s reaction to Level Squared.

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So (most of) the team met up in the week after PAX and talked through our options. These ranged from dumping the game and never discussing it again to forming a company to create a full version of Level Squared for release on multiple platforms.

This last option isn’t quite as silly as it sounds. We had representatives from both XBox and Playstation come by the booth and leave cards telling us to get in contact if we wanted support to develop for their indie programs. So it was a live and valid option.

However – we did not decide to go that route in the end. But nor did we decide to totally abandon Level Squared either.

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Our plan is to develop Level Squared into a reasonable length of game, and to put it up on itch.io as a portfolio piece that will be free to download.

There were a few factors that lead to this decision.

1. Members of the team are at different stages of uni. Some are graduating this year, others have one or two years of uni to go.
2. We do not have the personal finance or financial support that would allow us to work full time on Level Squared.
3. No-one had much appetite for entering into the legal and accounting negotiations that would be associated with forming a company.
4. I’m personally working full time already, and with part time uni study I have very little spare time to devote to this sort of project.
5. We are a team of eight people. This is not a realistic number to launch a sustainable indie studio. And this way we avoid the uncomfortable situation of working out who would be essentially kicked out.

So there you have it. We’re taking a bit of a break following PAX before we get back to work. Our plan is to have something ready to go by the time uni starts back next year (early March).

Keep an eye out for our release statement then!

 

Well.

It’s been a couple of weeks since the last update (sorry!). But what a couple of weeks those were.

I had a big Melbourne International Games Week. I went to a number of events, and a number of afterparties and networking events over the course of the whole week.

That was the first week, the second week I pretty much just took off cos I was tired from the week before. But we did have a meeting about Level Squared and discuss what we wanted to do now that PAX had happened and we had finished the semester.

But first – Games Week:

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GCAP Loading

First off was GCAP Loading. This is a day-long conference that caters to students and those new to or looking to enter the industry.

I volunteered to help out at Loading, so started off the day checking people off the attendance lists and issuing lanyards and name cards.

This was a great way to meet a bunch of people right out of the gate, and also to help out with an event that is just getting started (this is only the second year that Loading has run).

There was a big contingent of Swinburne students in attendance and this actually had the effect that I didn’t end up meeting as many people as I thought I would.

The talks that I did manage to catch were good, but the shorter format of the day meant that many of them were just starting to get interesting when they were forced to wind up.

I’m not 100% sure whether I will go along to GCAP Loading again next year. I feel as though I’ve almost got as much out of the event as I am going to, and would be better off concentrating on GCAP and other events over the course of the week.

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GCAP

Next up was two days at GCAP (Game Connect Asia Pacific). This was my first time attending GCAP and it was really eye-opening.

There were a huge number of people there and such an array of talks that it was almost a little overwhelming trying to work out what to go to.

In the end I spent most of the first day in the Design room and most of the second day in the Production room. The talks that I saw were informative and in depth and covered some topics that i’ve just started to wrap my head around this year, so it was great to hear from people who have been working with them for much longer.

A couple of highlights were talks on developing studio culture, data analytics for indie studios and production horror stories.

And following each day of GCAP were a networking event (on day 1) and the Australian Game Development Awards (on day 2). I had a great time at both of these, met and talked with a bunch of people and made quite a few new friends. It might have been good if these events didn’t revolve so completely around alcohol, to ensure that more people felt comfortable attending. I don’t generally have any problem with hanging out at these events, but I’m a straight, cis, white dude so of course I don’t.

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PAX Australia

Finally, PAX. The culmination of our uni year and our chance to finally show Level Squared off to the public.

Overall there was a really positive reception to Level Squared. The people who played our game had a fun time, the majority of people played through to the end. People found the game challenging, but not punishing or mean spirited.

It was really great to see people finally playing through the game that we had spent so much time and energy working on over the course of the year.

I’m not gonna lie though – I found it tough working a booth for the first time. I’m no the naturally most out-going person, so I find it difficult to approach and talk to people. I was fine with people who were playing our game, and with people who came up to talk to me about it, but going out into the crowd and trying to convince people walking past to stop and play was very difficult, and I can’t say that I did a particularly good job of it.

After working the booth on Friday morning, I was feeling quite down about the whole experience and wasn’t feeling very keen to return.

But walking around the show floor and checking out the Indie section and speaking with people on other booths perked me back up, and by the end of the weekend I was feeling better again.

By the time Megadev rolled on I was feeling great about the whole week. In fact I spent much of Megadev telling everyone that I saw how great their games were and how great a time I had had over the week.

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Well, that’s my quick round up of my Games Week. It’s gone a bit long, so I might have to cut it off there and make a Part 2 where I go into what our plans are for Level Squared following PAX and submission.

I’ll also run through what I’m planning to do over the summer break.