I’ve been spending a lot of my time in the last couple of months thinking about how I might move Perfect Minute Games from the “advanced hobbyist” phase it’s in to more of a professional entity. One of the big questions that comes up in that process is how to bootstrap a company. If you have some money available, that’s a big help, but if you don’t, or even if you’re just not careful enough with what you do have, then it’s a steep hill to climb.

If you don’t already know him, Jason Della Rocca is one of the founders of Execution Labs. He gave a talk at GDC 2017 about Advanced Entrepreneurship, and the more I watch it the more value I get from it. 

In particular, I’ve started really focusing on his idea of “scaffolding” your games, so that you plan your company’s games so that you can leverage the work from the current game to build the next one and the one after that.

For me, Beat Farmer fits into a series of games that all fall under the broad umbrella of music-driven games. Ideally the games that follow will build out and up in terms of scope and complexity and richness of the whole experience, and get some system and financial support from the fruits of the preceding games.

I’d really recommend watching this talk more than once. I watched it a while ago, and again today, and I expect to watch it at least once more. Some things are just like that – you need to go away and think and build your own ideas a bit, then come back and see what still resonates for you. Writing is like that, as is game design. If you, like me, are not a bizdevver first, you can still try this approach and maybe learn enough to make it work.