I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been able to get deep enough into Godot development at this point to feel comfortable offering development in the engine as part of my service profile.
Godot joins Unity and Unreal as well as bespoke development as a core Perfect Minute service offering. If you’ve got game development needs and want to use Godot for your engine, I’d love to have a chat!
This post is part of a series for game developers applying to the Canada Media Fund.
So far this series has mostly talked about different aspects of applying to the CMF for project funding. Today I want to talk about what happens after you’ve gotten a project accepted.
When you submit an application to CMF, you are assigned an agent. That person is your go-between for the application, and my experience has been that they’re delightfully helpful. Every time I wasn’t sure about something, I could send a question to the CMF agent and they’d get back to me in a couple of days with helpful information.
Here’s an example: I didn’t have payroll set up for Perfect Minute when I was getting ready to start work for Conceptualization. Getting an employee agreement was going to cost me several hundred dollars and possibly a couple of weeks waiting on my lawyer for the agreement. I’d committed to a start date that came earlier than I could possibly get those details sorted out, and so I asked the agent if I could act as a contractor until I had my employment agreement figured out. They indicated that this was highly irregular and not recommended, but in the end they helped me figure out how to bridge that gap.
Maybe that doesn’t sound like much from the outside. But the contract you sign with CMF has a bunch of clauses that basically say if you do anything shady they’re going to pull your funding. That’s not unusual on its own – any business contract is likely to include language that allows either party to exit in certain circumstances – but if you’re not familiar with the other party, or if you’re relatively new to contracts at this level, it can add a lot of stress. Having someone to help you navigate is a big deal.
It’s also important to note that each CMF program is divided into two or more phases. For Conceptualization, the program has just the two phases – Phase I covers your initial estimated costs and plan, and Phase II is your final, actual costs and plan. There’s money riding on getting the documentation for each phase correct.
This gets more complicated when you’re doing one of the production programs; those use three or more phases, with a “beta” delivery in the late-middle part of the development schedule. It’s not so different from how publishers use milestones, but having dealt with a few milestones from both the dev trenches and the managerial towers, they’re tricky.
Things can change really fast in game development, and if what you deliver to someone for a milestone is not what they expected, you might forfeit an expected milestone payment. I haven’t had that experience with CMF, but I’ve had it in other circumstances, and it can be absolutely crushing. Project-killing, even.
It’s important, then, to communicate when changes happen. I asked for several schedule extensions during the course of our Conceptualization work, as it became obvious that certain assets just wouldn’t be ready, and as we realized that some of the early decisions we’d made weren’t working as well as we’d hoped, requiring significant rework and direction shifts. And to their credit, CMF accommodated. The agent eventually came back and said listen, you’ve committed to all documentation by July, so just make sure you’ve got it all in by then.
For me, July wasn’t really an option – I have a day job, after all, and I can’t indefinitely dedicate the 20+ hours a week I was spending over the last four months to a second job – but that took some pressure off all the same. We delivered our final docs a couple of weeks ago, and there’s been a little back and forth since then, but ultimately we were approved on Phase II.
One of the things I personally was paranoid about when I was getting into the CMF’s orbit was my own lack of expertise in business. I was convinced that messing up documents and information would turn into an endless problem full of legal nightmares.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, however. Both during my applications and afterwards, I’ve been able to get detailed feedback on problems with my documents and information, submit amended versions, and see positive results.
I’m sure there’s a threshold below which the agent just can’t help, but thankfully ours was very ready to assist, and our documentation only needed a few changes to meet the requirements. It was encouraging to realize that this was how they do things.
The other thing that I appreciated during all of this was that the CMF’s Experimental program portfolio is designed to feed forward. When you submit your final documentation for Conceptualization, for example, they ask if you’re applying for any other programs.
We are, of course. I’ve already talked about the application we submitted to the Innovation & Experimentation program, but it was nice to know that there’s a built-in way to tie the two together. I feel confident that what we submitted shows us in a good light. If we can put together what we did with $20,000, it’s natural to believe we could do a lot more with a larger investment.
I’m excited at the idea, though truth be told I have no idea where I’d come up with our 25% right now. I’d hoped to avail of traditional (debt) financing, but so far that’s coming up empty. There’s the possibility of a Kickstarter, but these days those require a level of readiness and polish that exceeds the grasp of the average unfunded developer who nonetheless has to pay mortgages and keep life and limb together.
Maybe we’ll figure it out. Given we don’t yet have a demo or an approved application, it’s somewhat moot at the moment. But it’s important to be prepared.
On that note…watch this space for news in the days and weeks to come. Our little Action-Painting-Strategy RPG still has some legs yet.
Turns out this post is part of a series documenting my first application to the Canada Media Fund and in particular its Conceptualization program
I’m pleased to announce that Paint By Monsters was accepted for the 2022 CMF Conceptualization program, and has now been approved for funding by the CMF.
I’m also pleased to say the fine folks at Stellar Boar have agreed to work with me to lend their amazing artistic talents to the game.
It’s been a long road to get here, and at times I wasn’t certain things would work out. I’ve had to reflect on my goals for Perfect Minute Games itself while trying to work this project out.
In the intervening time I lost my day job, which has been rough in a bunch of different ways. But it also invites the alluring possibility of going full-time with game development.
I haven’t come to any hard decisions there, but I have come up with a kind of vision of what I think that would look like. I also had to incorporate the company, which means I’m the President and sole shareholder of the newly-minted Perfect Minute Games Inc. In other words, meet the new gamedev: same as the old gamedev.
But I’ve also got a diagnosis to think about, and its consequences have implications for me as the President of said company and its hypothetical evolution into a much more ambitious full-time pursuit.
I’m talking to some folks about further possibilities – people I want to work with, projects I want to plan for, funding I might need to execute on such a plan – and while all of that has been interesting, it’s a whole lot of work. Given I haven’t committed to this idea, that means I’m still mostly doing Perfect Minute stuff once I’ve gotten “real stuff” (job searching, grocery-getting, snow shoveling, dog entertaining, etc) accomplished each day. So for now, it’s mostly vision.
One of the skillsets that actually might help with turning that vision into something more, however, is bizdev. And as it turns out, I’ve actually done enough of that at this point, via various startup projects and events and communities (Oh My!), to feel minimally competent at it. I even made some slides for your entertainment, gentle player.
A pitch deck isn’t the most comfortable exercise to do for this company, not least because company decks tend to be used to attract equity investors – folks who want a piece of not just the project but the entire business. Those folks sometimes insist on conditions that can become onerous or even dangerous to the people in the company.
But the deck was still a useful exercise. It was created primarily as a preface to a conversation with the local tech accelerator, which has incubated at least two or three other studios over the past 20 years. In that context, creating a deck forced me to look at things with fresh eyes. I had to think about where I might be able to do something new-ish, something that would give folks a reason to believe that the company is worth investing in.
All of the “opportunities” I’ve identified in the deck are operational ones, which means they’re both easy to copy and extremely difficult to get right. That’s not what anyone who’s considering investing in a business wants to hear, but then again, every investor in my neck of the woods has already laughed me out of their office as soon as I mentioned game development.
Plus, there are a few companies I would say have already gotten this operational model right – PopCap, back in their early days, but also Brace Yourself and Supergiant. Those are intimidating competitors, but they’re also incredible company. One of the nice things about creative work is that nobody is really your direct competitor.
So sure, BYG are making Phantom Brigade, which is probably the best SF game you haven’t played yet, and sure, Powered A(r)mour is, in part, an appeal to all the mech game lovers out there. But that audience is far from being inundated with more great mech games than they could ever wish for. There’s even a case to be made that these two games, were they to coexist (and I hope they do someday!) would be seen as part of a larger revival of mechs in games. That’s a dream I could hang onto.
Moreover, while the examples I’ve listed are certainly worth some attention, they’re kind of exceptional. A lot of studios – especially indies – aren’t formed with a vision of company-building. They’re built around a single project, or maybe even just a group of folks making games together.
Don’t get me wrong, those are absolutely fine ways to approach things. But if you’re in my position and you suddenly need to think about what’s required to create a sustainable business, you need to think bigger.
When I reached out to the accelerator folks and to the tech and business community more generally, two important questions arose immediately:
$1M ARR is a kind of survival benchmark. If you can get to that level of revenue (without burning through millions of dollars in the process), so some folks will tell you, you’ve survived the part of the curve that kills off more than half of all startups.
It’s not quite that simple, of course – startup failure statistics vary drastically by industry, for one thing – but as big a number as it might seem, $1M ARR should just about pay for 10 people and some (limited, carefully controlled) business expenses. 10 people isn’t a huge studio, but it’s over a third the size of Supergiant or BYG, both of which I’d tend to consider successful, stable entities, and neither of which is all that much older than Perfect Minute in absolute terms.
Still, a path to $1M ARR feels…intimidating. If I look at Vampire Survivors, at its $6 price point, and considering that something like $2 of that price will go to Steam and payment processing, it would be necessary to sell TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND copies to reach that target. And not just one time – that number, every year, for as long as the company operates.
Now, Vampire Survivors is a breakout hit. I’m sure poncle has long since topped the million-dollar mark. But it has spawned an endless stream of imitators, and very few of those will have the same luck. You can’t bet on hits. You have to plan as if you’re going to be really, really average. Or better yet, really incredibly median.
The thing that’s required here is Market Research. I’ve been looking for publicly available game-specific market research resources for years now, and so it’s simultaneously gratifying and vaguely irritating to only just now happen upon VGInsights’ Steam Analytics and Top Charts data, not to mention their excellent indie game price analysis.
Taken together, these resources offer enough information to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations about sales figures and revenue. I threw this data into the finance section of Futurpreneur’s excellent Business Plan Writer tool and exported the data to a spreadsheet that I could point to for reference when talking about revenue projections.
PMG 3-Year Financial Projections
I’m sure someone will point out that these figures are hopelessly optimistic, that the median revenue for indie games is vanishingly small, that even planning for the median requires some big assumptions. And I won’t argue those points. This is where the rest of the vision I outlined in the pitch deck come in.
Of course, you can have all the vision in the world and it’ll do no good unless you can execute. If, for example, your business model relies on launching 4 games a year, you can’t half-ass it. But that’s what project plans are for.
3-Year Resource Allocation Plan
It’s hard to look at that plan and not think of all the ways it could go off the rails. But you don’t necessarily have to execute any plan perfectly and to the smallest detail. Nor do revenues have to track exactly with projections. Luck plays a part. The point is to give ourselves the best statistical chance we can.
While I was working on all this, I found a bunch of gnarly issues with my plans.
Taking out a massive operating loan at 7% interest, for example, could cripple the company. The interest and principal payments could throttle cash flow long before revenue can grow enough to compensate. Better, then, to acknowledge that a smaller loan is a better option, even if it requires extra work to seek other funding options.
Ditto piling 2 years or more of non-monetized post-release work on half a dozen games on top of the effort required to actually build the next game. It’s critical to control the amount of work in flight at any given time. Putting the numbers into a spreadsheet I discovered exactly how hard this vision would be to execute successfully. But I also confirmed that it is doable, at least on paper.
Just as importantly, I believe that having a plan, however starry-eyed it may be, is a necessary first step towards success. I don’t know what the next step will be, or whether I’ll take it once I do know.
For now, though, I’ll just say:
I did this, so you can do this. Take whatever value you find in what I’ve written here. I hope it helps you figure out some important bits of your own starry-eyed vision.
Featured Image: “Construction Tunnel” by chrismetcalfTV is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
A while ago, Orange Slip Studios asked whether I’d be interested in working with them on a project. The fruits of that discussion are now publicly available, and it’s a good feeling.
Disastrophe! (diz-ass-tro-fee) is actually not the first project we talked about, but it’s the first one that we had the means to complete. Disastrophe! is a round-based survival game on the Roblox platform, and I’m pretty proud of it.
We also have a fair bit of content in the pipe to add to the game in the next while, including new disasters, custom Roblox outfits, and consumable items to help you during gameplay.
I’d encourage you to try the game out and leave your feedback on the game page. This is a made-in-Newfoundland project with a mostly-based-in-Newfoundland team, and we’re hopeful that it will gain an audience in the weeks to come. You can help us make that happen!
I’ve been working on getting the non-gameplay aspects of Beat Farmer figured out of late, and that has meant getting some of the basics figured out for Perfect Minute as a functioning business.
Before I did anything, I needed to commit to the business more heavily than I have been. I have an aversion to not paying people for their work, so I started putting away $100 per paycheque from my day job. There are a variety of opinions on funding game development, some of which encourage you to self-fund, others focused more on external investment, but as a rule I find that paying out of pocket helps me remember to look for the best possible value for my money, so that’s my preferred bootstrapping method.
With that tiny pot of money, my first order of business was finding an artist. I’m trying to hire locally where possible, so I sent out a call on this blog and on my friendly local game development Facebook community. I got a few portfolios right away, including an artist I was very interested in working with, Clay Burton.
Finding someone so quickly meant I had to scramble a bit to get the contract drawn up. I initially considered using Law Depot, but I didn’t feel confident that I would get something I could trust to legally enforce the rights I needed.
I looked around town to find a lawyer specializing in IP and media and settled on Lindsay Wareham at Cox and Palmer, whose focus areas include Intellectual Property and Startups, which seemed like a good fit. I’ve since discovered that Cox and Palmer have several folks working together in this area, as well as a helper program for startups in general, which gives me hope that I have, for once, made a pretty good call.
The drafting of the contract took a couple of weeks and wasn’t too expensive, as legal matters go. A lot of good questions came up during my conversation with Lindsay, though, stuff like:
Two weeks later I had a shiny new contract ready to fill out. I sent it over to my artist, who sent it back with his name on it…but not a witness! This is my first time doing this, and I didn’t want to bug the guy more than necessary, but after chatting with Lindsay, I had to go back and beg him to get it witnessed as well. So that’s ready to go.
I also sent out a call a while ago for a music person for the game, and I use the word “person” on purpose there, because I don’t know much about doing music in a game.
One of the musicians I know in town recommended his buddy, Georgie Newman. Georgie and I had spoken briefly after that initial request, but never got around to talking further. I reached out and we decided to meet up and chat. That turned out to be really great for me, as Georgie knows what he is at to a much higher degree than I do when it comes to game audio.
That conversation has now left me with a number of things I need to do (“action items”, as the cool fogies say):
As error-prone dark-groping goes, this has actually been ok. I’m hopeful that I can get all the way to the publishing phase without destroying myself and/or the company financially or otherwise in the process.
I’ll keep you posted!
As I mentioned on Twitter,
What's the best way to find a #gameartist for a mini contract (~$200) these days?
— Michael Murphy-Burton (@oldmanhero) July 18, 2017
I’m looking for a freelance artist to do a small job for Beat Farmer.
New ideas every day for #BeatFarmer. Can't wait to have enough to show it off.
— Perfect Minute Games (@perfectminute) July 17, 2017
I’m looking for someone who can do clean 2d/3d work in a cute/cartoon style. If you happen to know anyone who might suit, please have them send a portfolio to mgb@perfectminutegames.com.
