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CMF 6: The Process

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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.

The (Not So Secret) Agent

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.

Program Phases

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.

About That Back and Forth

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.

Graduation

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.

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“Contracts” by NobMouse is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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CMF 5: Putting Together an Application for the Big Dogs

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

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:

CPP

  1. Caps out at $1.5M
  2. Provides 75% of funding
  3. Includes production, marketing, and promotion
  4. Requires completed concept and prototype stages
  5. Newly in 2023-24, requires a Narrative Positioning Statement
  6. Uses a selective evaluation matrix
  7. Funds projects with “a greater probability of commercial success”

I&E

  1. Caps out at $1.5M
  2. Provides 75% of funding
  3. Includes production, marketing, and promotion
  4. Requires completed concept and prototype stages
  5. Newly in 2023-24, requires a Narrative Positioning Statement
  6. Uses a selective evaluation matrix
  7. Funds projects that are “innovative and leading-edge”

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:

CPP

  1. Team (15%)
    1. Experience individually & together (11%)
    2. Diversity (2%)
    3. Parity (2%)
  2. Narrative Positioning Statement (5%)
  3. Potential for Commercial Success (45%)
    1. Content and Form (20%)
    2. Financial Viability (25%)
  4. Strategic Positioning & Marketing (35%)

I&E

  1. Team (15%)
    1. Experience individually & together (11%)
    2. Diversity (2%)
    3. Parity (2%)
  2. Narrative Positioning Statement (5%)
  3. Innovation, Creativity, and Advancement (60%)
  4. Financial Viability (15%)
  5. Strategic Positioning & Marketing (10%)

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.

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Bizdev for Gamedev is Not For Everyone

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One of the things I took on when I started looking seriously at turning Perfect Minute Games into my full-time gig was an accelerator on-ramp program run by Genesis here in St. John’s.

VCs != Games

The program, which is called Evolution, is not new to me. I completed it a while back, along with another Genesis course, when I was focused on earlier iterations of PMG and some other ideas. Both courses were, at the time, aimed squarely at preparing pitch decks to present to VCs.

I had a problem with this approach in my previous encounters. VCs – particularly those in my neck of the woods – don’t really get into games all that much.

VCs like to bet on companies that will scale massively, for one thing. They make a lot of bets and pray one of them will grow their investment by 10x or better, paying for a whole cohort of failures. Game development doesn’t really scale like that, barring a few mega-dev/publishers (Zynga/Tencent, EA, a few other outliers).

They also like to bet on the company, not the project. Games are usually funded per-project, which is the way most creative work is funded. Ask any experienced grant writer how many times they’ve written a project proposal versus a company proposal, and you’re pretty likely to get a much bigger number for the former than the latter.

VCs also want company equity, and the number of game studios that actually develop a stock that’s worth owning is vanishingly small. Not to mention company equity usually means board seats, and hence some level of executive influence or even outright control. Very few VCs are equipped to exert non-destructive influence over a company making games, and that’s assuming they’re not the type of VC that will strip-mine the company for valuable IP and dump the carcass in an alley.

Now, Jason Della Rocca and Keith Katz did (do?) run a gamedev incubator of sorts , and there are a few other accelerator programs around the world that focus on game developers, but even there, the numbers are small, and the model is murky at best.

Seed Funding and Games

I recently decided to withdraw from the Evolution program. I realized that the problems I’d encountered in my previous run-through were still there, and that I was stressing myself out trying to balance the time demanded by the program – which are MUCH heavier than they were the last time around – against the time required to actually work on things that apply to a game development business.

It doesn’t help, of course, that every investor I’ve ever talked to about games has, to put it politely, laughed me out of their office. There is an overwhelming negative signal from such folks towards game developers trying to establish a studio. One of the problems with the Evolution program is how focused it is on exciting these folks, who are all but openly hostile to the business segment I’m in.

So how do we fund startup studios? There’s certainly lots of advice on the subject.

  • “Don’t quit your day job” is offered as a very literal prescription from all corners. This is, of course, good advice for individuals, but an astonishingly bad foundation for business development.
  • The omnipresent “Friends and Family Round” is commonly suggested. I sometimes wonder if this round works if and only if you come from a wealthy social background; certainly I know of very few people with friends or family who would invest more than a pittance into their business.
  • Folks outside of Canada often look at the CMF with envy, since it provides at least some kind of ab initio on-ramp for the budding developer. But even on a (bargain-basement-priced) $100,000 development budget, CMF still insists you come up with $25,000, and that’s not nothing.

I don’t want to suggest these problems are unique to game developers. But I do think they’re more imposing for us, as a rule. There are far fewer resources suited to the challenges of our business. Even those challenges that are otherwise generic – think building a working business model, analyzing market trends, making revenue predictions, establishing business relationships, and so on – don’t map cleanly to their game development incarnations.

Meanwhile, the dominant “traditional” modes of game funding – publishers and hardware incentive programs – fall outside the expertise of most business development resources. Even those resources focused on the tech sector as a whole don’t know enough about the game business to be helpful. They don’t adjust well to a business that operates, as mentioned previously, much more akin to arts funding.

There are resources that can help, though. The IGDA exists, for one, and there are mentors out there who will, for a reasonable fee, offer their hard-earned insights. There are half a dozen commercial market analytics services that can offer insight into how games make money. Some of them aren’t even crushingly expensive!

But it’s been my experience, thus far, that the average founder in this business is going to need to pick up bizdev in a hurry. So let’s talk about what to look for.

  1. Obviously, if you’re in Canada, look at the CMF programs. There are people who will laugh at this option or tell you this will cripple you, and hey, maybe they’re right. But these programs are incredibly generous when set next to the average investor or publisher contract.
  2. Look at your local business development options, particularly those more suited to brick and mortar. There are things you won’t necessarily know about – cheap accountants and lawyers, subsidized business consultants, business plan writing courses – that will help you develop as a business executive, and saving time, especially in the early stages, is critical, because you need all the time you can harness to develop a product.
  3. If you have access to low-interest credit products, you can self-fund. It’s a bad option, but you’ll get some return on it, maybe, someday. Think about how to bake that investment into your company, though. Get advice on the best approach.
    1. You can also sometimes access business funding programs by backing the debt with a personal guarantee. This is a bad option, too, because even if you incorporate you’re liable for these debts – but the interest rates may be low enough to make it better than other debt-funded options.
  4. Look for programs from large-scale business development agencies. They won’t all directly provide money with which you can pay yourself – the latter, in particular, is a rare beast indeed – but they can often provide other means to that end. Hiring a junior under a recent grad incentive may allow you to take on extra work, or get a product to market faster, or have a resource for a set of tasks you would otherwise need to handle yourself – marketing, hiring, design, the list is endless
  5. Build small games in quick succession, and get them out there. This serves many purposes, but for now let’s focus on two key ones:
    1. It provides some kind of revenue stream that can feed into the general operating coffers
    2. It provides proof of “traction”, which is a term business development folks like to use when they don’t want to say Show Me The Money, Jerry. Traction is essentially how you prove you know what you’re doing. And when it comes to traction, there’s just no substitute for products that are already earning revenue.
  6. Approach publishers early and often. There are a number of resources to help with this, including a big list maintained by the some of the folks behind the Indie Game Business channel, and a much smaller but more curated list from Beamable. There are also specialists out there in the world who offer their expertise in this area as a paid service, and there are lots of networking events that will accelerate the process (again, for. a fee).
  7. Look at companies servicing game developers like Beamable and Xsolla, as well as more general-purpose startup folks like F6S.
  8. Get whatever data you can from market insight services like VGInsights and data.ai. Some market insight services offer a very affordable price to indies, though these tend to also be limited in ways that can be quite inconvenient. Nonetheless, they’re sufficient to get started on building a business plan.
  9. You may be able to avail of specialty funding. Check out the city, state, and federal organizations for arts and technology. Look for project development grants, digital media tax credits, innovation funding, and SRED-like programs, just for a start. These aren’t just for the specialists! Ideally, games are such a tight mix of innovative technology and art that funding opportunities can be found on all sides. Of course, the cold truth is that many programs – foolishly, in my admittedly biased opinion – on both sides exclude games

I’m sure there are many, many other tools out there I’m missing, and I’d love to hear what you’re using. My goal isn’t to provide infallible expertise so much as it is to provide a starting point for someone who might find themself in my shoes. It can be grueling, and if you’re a dev as well as a bizdev, the time and effort required can leave you feeling stretched and exhausted.

But if we’re going to do this for a living, it’s critical work. I wish you luck.

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“Bangkok Road Confusion” by hc.saustrup is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

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CMF Conceptualization Iteration 4 – Funding and Bizdev and Planning Oh My!

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Turns out this post is part of a series documenting my first application to the Canada Media Fund and in particular its Conceptualization program

Post 1
Post 2
Post 3

Paint By Monsters Has Funding!

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.

The Aforementioned Long Road

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.

Bizzy Devvy

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.

Pitch Deck

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.

Building For Years, Not Games

When I reached out to the accelerator folks and to the tech and business community more generally, two important questions arose immediately:

  1. What’s your revenue model?
  2. What’s your path to $1M annual recurring revenue (ARR)?

$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.

Applying the Data

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.

Is It Realistic?

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.

biz, Games, Prototypes

CMF Conceptualization Iteration 3 – SoloDev Edition

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This is the third time I’m talking about this. Post 1 and post 2 talked about how the whole thing works and how to make my application a better fit for the program criteria. They were both focused on Powered A(r)mour. But things changed in the last few weeks, and I figured I’d take another run at it.

I’ve been putting a lot of attention into Paint By Monsters the last few weeks, so it makes sense to apply for that project. So the other night I did that.

There are a few oddities in that process that are sticking with me, and I figured that’s a sign that it might be worth talking through it with y’all.

The first thing is just…what’s a prototype? Are the individual features I’ve been building a prototype? The funding Conceptualization provides is modest – capping out at $15,000 on a total budget of $20,000 – but in solo and small-team development, that money could get you a really long way. It’s one of the reasons I asked the CMF folks about team composition.

So one of the things I have to do is avoid overthinking that question. I don’t think what I have is a prototype by any reasonable definition, and it’s certainly not $20,000 worth of development, unless I’m massively undervaluing my own time.

To some extent this is a CMF issue – they don’t talk in much detail about what a prototype is for their purposes. I tried to talk about these programs in the first article, but let’s take a look at the descriptions provided by CMF:

Conceptualization

The Conceptualization Program, which forms part of the CMF’s Experimental Stream, allocates funding to Eligible Projects at the very beginning of a Project’s creative process with the objective of giving a Project a better chance to succeed for future stages of financing. Specifically, this Program is designed to allow an Eligible Applicant to create and test a proof of concept and verify either the design idea, concept assumption or demonstrate a functionality in preparation for the Prototyping phase and beyond.

Prototyping

The Prototyping Program allocates funding to projects at the early stages of building a product to demonstrate its intended functionalities and design. Specifically, this phase is for experimenting, testing and validating different concepts and hypotheses to arrive at a first functional prototype.

Beyond this, the required documentation for Conceptualization includes the following language:

CONCEPT DESCRIPTION (MAX. 3 PAGES) provide a written proof of concept proposal indicating clearly what you wish to create and test with the requested funds. The proposal can explore design ideas, concept assumptions or new functionalities and is required to convincingly present how it will be significantly interactive or immersive and how it will be connected to the Canadian cultural sector. Projects at the prototype stage cannot apply under the Conceptualization Program.

That’s…yeah. Confusing. Some language there is actually more similar to the description of the Prototyping program. What’s the difference between a concept assumption and a concept, for example?

So, again, best not to overthink it. PBM is at a very early stage and is in no way a mature concept, and that should really be good enough for a program aimed at early stage projects.

The second thing that’s weird about this is…I’m solo. I don’t have a team. I don’t even really have a network, though I have folks I could maybe talk to if I had resources. The bit of CMF’s response that talks about adjusting the team after the fact was useful here: My team is me, and just about anyone I contract with will be better at the things I ask them to do (art, animation, sound, music, and so on), so…that’s it. Even though I don’t have resources or people lined up right now, there’s a window between a theoretical acceptance and the signing of contracts wherein I could take that funding and attract someone good.

I recognize that’s not the stated intent, but to be honest, the folks I’ve talked to at CMF seem to think that they’re fine with small teams that manage things more or less this way. I’m just holding them to the standard they’ve communicated to me directly.

The third thing that’s weird is this:

Student film breakdown or solodev budget? You be the judge!

I’m doing all the things, so my name goes everywhere. I don’t intend to do things this way in the long term, and I’d really like to be able to do things differently in the short term, but frankly, if it’s good enough for Minecraft and Papers, Please and Tunic, it’s good enough for me.

I don’t really expect to be accepted on the basis of this application, to be honest. Conceptualization is a largely reserved-cohort fund, for one thing, and while I fit into some of those cohorts, I don’t particularly want to take up a slot that could go to someone who fits better and who needs this more than I do.

Plus, this really isn’t the kind of thing that CMF does. I’m a random guy building a game in my off hours. I don’t think anyone’s looking at me as a major contributor to the Canadian cultural scene. I don’t think of myself that way. I’m doing something I love, and I just want help making it the best version of itself. I don’t know that what I’m doing is worthy of note.

But I also don’t know that it’s not. Maybe this game becomes someone’s favourite. I can see the shape of things to come in the dim shadows beyond the work I’m doing right now, and I’m excited to explore them and define them and try them out. I wasn’t a working actor for very long, but it’s a similar feeling – you see the potential of what could be, and you do your utmost to make that a reality.

So…wish me luck? And if you’re a producer or a CMF staffer or just a person with some thoughts about all this, I’d love to hear your perspective on all this. We could use more open discussion about what CMF is for and how small developers – who are often the most passionate and interesting artists in the field – can get their projects work a little better and a little faster.

“Stock Photography – Canadian Money” by Katherine Ridgley is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

devblog, Games, Prototypes

Paint By Monsters: Devlog 2 – Work To Date

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I promised some local tech folks I’d do a weekly summary of my progress on Paint By Monsters, and I figured since I was doing that anyway, I’d expand on it over here for anyone who’s not in that very specific community.

First of all, I’m happy to report that PBM feels kind of like a game now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LGMChMhVFk

Things of note in that video include:

  1. Programmer art new logo!
  2. FTL-style “Progression” screen – as I understand it, these are required by law for roguelike and roguelite games
  3. Upgrades – each time you defeat a hero, you get an upgrade for your monsters. I’ll be expanding on these over time, and probably playing with other possibilities.

There are lots of smaller details, too, but I’m mostly just happy to be well on the way to something that’s game-ish in form.

I’ve got lots of plans and ambitions in mind for the game in the weeks and months to come, so I hope you’ll stay tuned for those. Some of the high notes include:

  1. Lair Building v1 – add balconies, traps, chandeliers, and more
  2. More progression stuff
  3. More monsters
  4. Acrobatic maneuvers

I mentioned some of those in my first Devlog over on Itch.io. Which reminds me – if you’re wondering how I’ll be working Devlogs going forward, I’m planning to alternate between itch and this site, with links going both ways. I’m hoping you’ll stick with me on that. I tend to prefer to keep things on this site, but it’s nice to have a more well-known presence as well, especially since between the game page on itch.io and the ko-fi page for Perfect Minute Games I’ve moved from “fun pastime” to “thing I’m both spending and soliciting money for”.

That’s always a bit of a hard rubicon to cross, from hobby to serious, but I’m trying to take the lowest, informal-est approach possible right now so I can keep my focus squarely on making the game itself as fun as I can. At some point I’d like to expand my ambitions to include custom art, animation, and music, but I’m not in a rush for now.

Having said that, if you’re an artist or composer who might be interested in partnering up, my email is always open:

mgb (at) perfectminutegames (dot) com

I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the interest folks have expressed in Paint By Monsters thus far. I’m excited to work on my own game design again, of course, but you never know how well it translates to anyone else. So getting feedback and even financial support has been incredibly encouraging.

Hope yer well.

biz, devblog

A Brief Followup on the CMF Conceptualization Application

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As I mentioned previously, I tried my hand at filling out a CMF application more or less “for real” this year. There were a couple of things, as I mentioned on Twitter, that threw me for a loop, and since I actually got some feedback from the lovely helpful folks at CMF, I figured I’d share:

  1. The “Material to be Delivered for this Application” section does, as I suspected, refer to the end result/output from the project. For Conceptualization – particularly if the project is intended to proceed to Prototyping or a production program – that would almost certainly be a proof of concept and perhaps some supporting documentation around market and creative strategies
  2. As I also suspected, having no paid team members committed to the project is going to be a serious drawback for an application for funding. The response I got also indicated that they recommend you pay yourself as well as other team members, so that’s good to know, I s’pose. Not like I DON’T want money, just seems somewhat counterproductive to getting the most out of the investment. I suspect that my situation is at least somewhat abnormal in the overall audience for these programs, however.
    1. They recommended to me that I look for at least a “soft commit” from other folks, and also suggested that if those folks aren’t able to fulfill that commitment after a successful application it would be ok to proceed with someone else filling that role. So that’s actually really good to know.

Anyway, I thought those were worth sharing. I’ve also started to do some foundational research for Powered A(r)mour, but that’s still in very early stages, so not much to talk about just yet.