This post is part of a series aimed at game developers applying to the Canada Media Fund.

• Post 1
• Post 2
• Post 3
• Post 4

To date, I’ve talked mostly about the process involved with the CMF’s Conceptualization program. Conceptualization is the definition of seed money – low barrier to entry (though 2023-24’s changes make it a bit higher for us old white dudes, but I’m ok with that), low dollar value available, highly contingent on being the right person in the right place at the right time.

Conceptualization, however, is mostly designed to feed into the Big Hairy Audacious project programs. These are, in no particular order, Prototyping, Commercial Projects (CPP), and Innovation & Experimentation (I&E).

Prototyping I’ll leave for today; I haven’t actually gone through the application process for it, and so I can’t speak directly to either the work or the experience.

Instead, let’s at the other two, which I’ll collectively refer to as the “production” programs. First, let’s compare and contrast:

Not a lot of daylight between these two, huh? Point #7 differentiates between the two programs, and even there, at first glance, it feels like a distinction without a difference. But it becomes clearer once we consider the evaluation criteria from #6’s matrix:

I actually find this to be a great breakdown, and I wish I’d realized much earlier just how different the percentages are between the two. I might have focused even more energy on which program to apply to and why.

So Which One Should I Apply To?

It depends on your project, obviously. For Paint By Monsters, despite channelling elements of half a dozen all-time banger hits, we’re taking a LOT of creative and commercial risks all at once, so we went for the Innovation & Experimentation program. If you’re doing something a bit safer but you have all your ducks in a row as to how you’re going to make money with it, Commercial Projects is likely your better bet.

The Paperwork, Dear God the Bloody Paperwork

The thing that I found most intimidating about CMF programs before I applied the first time was just how heavy the documentation requirements were. Even Conceptualization’s lightweight bucket of text felt like an overwhelming commitment.

But as it turns out, it’s just paperwork, and you’re going to have to do it at some point, so you may as well take a CMF application as a chance to practice.

Different folks will no doubt find different parts of the application difficult, but for me the most intimidating part was the budget. The CMF kindly provides template spreadsheets that guide you through filling out a complete program budget – and, in the case of CPP and I&E, a monthly cashflow statement – but it’s still a lot to behold.

In point of fact, I didn’t start with the CMF budget. I was in the first half of the Evolution program at Genesis here in St. John’s earlier this year, and they pointed me at the Futurpreneur Business Planner. The idea of writing a budget for a couple of hundred thousand dollars got very real, very quick at that point – I have to make a living, plus pay the Stellar Boar folks and our incredible sound artists, and I’d love to hire a few other folks along the way. Doing all that takes a whole lot of money.

Using the planner’s financials tool, I came up with a first cut at a 3-year financial plan. Some key things I’d like to highlight here:

1. I’d already decided that part of the plan was to give myself more than one kick at the can, so I have 3 different sources of revenue (Paint By Monsters, Business to Business services aka B2B, and Other Games)
2. I’ve listed $20,000 a month in wages. That sounds like a lot, maybe, but it’s really not. One senior programmer is half that, and if you want a senior artist to pair with them you could easily spend it all on 2 people. In my case it’s more like 3-5 total positions, but saying that just makes me aware that my budget is Really Tight.
3. There are a LOT of other fees to consider. Insurance, legal, accounting, of course, but for games you also have market fees and Unity’s cut and royalties and on and on it goes.
4. I’m cash-negative in year 3. That’s a huge red flag, and suggests that I should have built in a lot more work on games beyond Paint By Monsters.
5. I’m putting in my own cash. It’s not a lot of money – $5,000 against $345,000 in start-up costs – but it’s not zero. There are lots of games you can play to increase that number – computer equipment donated to the company, service-in-kind, etc – but there’s nothing quite like putting cash on the barrelhead to say “I think this has a good chance of success”.
6. The plan includes debt-funding a significant percentage of activities. This is dicey, and can easily backfire, particularly now that interest rates are back to something like normal. But in a pinch, it’s better to have 25% of your capital at a high interest rate and 75% at a low one than have 100% at a high interest rate. And frankly, it’s still better than most equity deals, at least as far as the long-term costs go.

In the worst case, all of the above sounds like every CFO you ever tuned out halfway through, but this is the exercise, folks. We have to be serious about the money, because the main thing we’re asking for is money.

The full list of paperwork that you need for the programs can be found in the relevant document package, but they all go roughly as follows:

1. Application In Dialogue
   1. Brief description of the project
   2. List of key people involved and their PERSONA-ID account numbers
2. Signed and Dated Budget and Cashflow
3. Financing Commitment Letters
4. Declaration of the Corporations Canadian Status and its Shareholders and Directors
5. Other corporate documents
6. Narrative Positioning statement & attestations
7. Team Description
8. CVs for all team members
9. IP history and ownership for the project
10. Market research and marketing plan
11. Project summary (short) and description (long). The short one is almost as hard to create as the long one.
12. A demo
    1. Technically, video of your demo, but just as a professional courtesy: don’t fake it. If you don’t have a demo, apply for Conceptualization or Prototyping. It’ll have a lower barrier of entry, and will probably help you when the time comes to try for a production program
    2. NB: Do NOT show a demo for conceptualization or prototyping. They won’t even accept you if you have something you’re calling a demo. Paint By Monsters had “Feature Demos”, which is luckily just far enough outside of that to qualify, but I feel like it was a near thing.

Partnering Up

As mentioned, I’m working with Stellar Boar Productions, and that means I’m lucky enough to have a mature, financially stable company alongside my fledgeling studio as well as a very involved and invested partner in this project, Curtis Rioux.

Curtis took on a bunch of the work for this application, and he’s my hero forever because of it. He’s the artist of the partnership, and he made the whole package look 10,000% better, plus he wrote essentially the entire marketing end of it. Highly recommend finding yourself a Curtis. Not my Curtis, obviously. He’s mine. But A Curtis.

All of this was complicated by the fact that over the course of the project our little team of two has expanded. At first it was just me, and then Curtis came onboard, and then his in-house artists. Midway through Conceptualization, we added our sound guys Chris and Adam. And as we head towards full production, we’ve realized we should commit to a few others – a couple of art specialists, a marketing & community resource, a junior programmer, maybe a couple of interns.

This means we have to employ or at least compensate a total of 11 or more people over the course of the project. Our individual studios are still quite small – I’m still one person, looking to add two more, and Curtis only has three plus an intern – but it’s obvious that we can move a lot faster by spreading work out more, and that feels like the right move.

It’s So Much Money

Yeah, it is. And then again, it’s really not.

When I rebooted Perfect Minute Games to focus on original projects, I had Megan Fox‘s words from while back on my mind – you should spend less than $50,000 making your game, because there’s a very high probability you’ll never make back more than that.

That vision is still appealing to me, but I have to recognize that it only goes so far. At some point, you decide whether to work fast or to work cheap, and if you believe – as I have come to believe – that the key to success is largely repeated execution of a good core concept, then you shouldn’t squeeze too hard.

The thing that keeps coming back to me about all that, though, is we really do need IDM funding that fits into the sub-$100k bucket. Teams should be able to build a demo of a good idea with support. Maybe not every team can have that, but it should at least exist.

Go Forth and Gamify

So. What else can I tell you? The paperwork is a stack, but you can do the easy version first. The scope is intimidating, but if you look around, it’s not far from what you’ll have to do for a publisher. None of it is game development, and that’s probably the really hard part – most of us just want to add features and do cool stuff and work with good teams.

That should be enough. It should. But it’s not, and I hope sharing my experiences with the process at least helps you get through the vegetables part of the business a bit quicker.