By Hello...
So… Welcome to the first Studio Shenanigans entry. Despite the misleading name, shenanigans is really the opposite of what have we been up to, and its also sort of the opposite (most of the time) of what we will be talking about in this blog. What the name does reflect though, is the relatively laid back way in which this blog will be written, with the intention of chilled out but informative and interesting reading. Though we will leave it up to you on whether its interesting or not.
So what about this post?
Well, this is an introduction of sorts.. for both the shenanigans blog, the studio itself, and where we have come from.
As this is being written is been about 6 months (give or take) since the incorporation of Studio 316 and the start of the teams venture into the big phat scary games industry. But as scary as it is, it’s been an exhilarating, unexpected, tough, amazing 6 months that has somewhat snowballed into what some might call a real games studio in a pretty small amount of time! Which just baffles me massively.
So what this post is about, is the first 6 months of Studio 316. albeit slightly skewed into my personal perspective as a “CEO”. (Italicized because do those titles really mean much?)
We aren't in Uni anymore...
Starting 3rd year
When the team started the Time Rivals project in the 3rd year of our respective game development/art degrees, none of us could have responded to the question “Are you guys going to start a studio after this?” with a resounding yes. Without a doubt everyone’s mindset was that we wanted to do big things and do it well, but starting a studio was definitely not on in the front of our minds.
Even for me personally, it was only about a month before the year started that i even managed to reach out and get involved in the team. I was friends with some members, just acquaintances to others but I was welcomed into the team by everyone and after a little over a year working together we have formed a solid, capable and ambitious team all aligned with the vision of creating games the way we want to, now we have a great remote working atmosphere and essentially, a group of good mates, doing what we love.
And so, we started 3rd year and we tossed a few different concepts around before settling on the Time Rivals concept. Though it wasn’t called Time Rivals for a little while, and the main concept was for a game play mechanic that allowed for players to place their respawns during the game as they fight. (Henceforth known as “Clone Pods”)
Starting the Time Rivals Project
The initial prototype wasn’t even in first person, it was pitched as a top down, MOBA style 1v1 game. Luckily, with tools like Unreal Engine being as they are these days, we were able to very rapidly create a few different versions of prototypes based around this clone pods mechanic. Eventually we tried it in an FPS, built to resemble an Overwatch/Team Fortress 2 style shooter and we instantly knew it suited that best. Those moment to moment bits of gameplay where you could use your clone pod to massively outplay someone felt rewarding and entertaining so we knew that would be our focus for the year and we could build an amazing game around it.
Discovering Tranzfuser
And so, after about 6 months of further concepting and iteration, we had the Time Rivals project. Undoubtedly not without its flaws, bugs were falling out of our butts at this point, but we did also have a working multiplayer game with a full gameplay loop and a couple of unique characters so we felt good.
It was around this point where a few times in conversation with some university staff the “Tranzfuser” competition was mentioned. We heard more, and more, did our own due diligence and we were pretty set from then on that we wanted to try and participate in something like this, not only to kickstart our careers, but also to give us some more time to keep developing Time Rivals.
And so we applied, after a lot of documentation building and application forms, creating pitch decks and so on. Luckily, we had the vote of confidence from Falmouth University and the Staff at the Games Academy putting us on the top of the list for teams to take part. The Enterprise pathway gave us a shot at not only bolstering personal portfolios, but to start a team, a studio, a real business off the back of what could easily be considered a passion project! Maybe even at this point we didn’t think that we would have taken the studio this far, but you wouldn’t bet on us not trying.
So we got accepted onto the Tranzfuser pathway, Bosh. Massive confidence boost, everyone is driven and ready for the next 3 months of Tranzfuser…Then all of a sudden, 3rd year was over. We had submitted our last assignments, grades were back and we had graduated. It really did just go within the blink of an eye. But none the less, We weren’t in Uni anymore… we were in the real world now, with the next 3 months developing under the Tranzfuser programme to prove ourselves.
Failing fast and making tough calls...
Losing out
And just as fast as Uni was over, Tranzfuser was too. Not that those 3 months weren’t crammed full of an absolute monster amount of work from everyone still with the team and a dedication to getting our studio off the ground.
Within about 3 weeks of starting the Tranzfuser programme, id created and published the Studio 316 website along with a blog space prepped and ready for time rivals posts. We had spoken to LOADS of industry heads, and I mean LOADS. If there is anything you do starting a studio or making a name for your brand, my advice would be to just talk to people – as many people as you can and don’t stop.
We had made great progress with Time Rivals, We had revamped the game during the 3 months with new character prototypes, new level blockouts and we spent some money hiring independent animators to help with our characters. We paid a musician to do a theme for the menus. We play tested the game regularly, and built a dedicated discord community that tested the game with us.
Within 2 months, we went from a rag tag group of student developers making a game for Uni to a somewhat legitimate studio, We set the limited company up, got a business bank account, we felt like the real deal. We had even started the process of diversifying our studio into contracting for software/game development and had our first client in talks with us. 2 months after leaving Uni!
The 3 months was over fast, and when Tranzfuser ended and we had pitched our idea and done absolutely everything we thought we could to get ourselves on that winners list and earn some money to keep working on Time Rivals…
We were pretty gutted when we found out we hadn’t won.
Where is your motivation…
For about half a day we were a bit like a mopey teenager who hadn’t got his way, but relatively swiftly, it turned straight into our motivation. Proving the judges wrong, putting in more of a grind, keeping at it and showing what we could do.
If it wasn’t for Tranzfuser the studio wouldn’t be where it is now, but I genuinely believe that if it wasn’t for losing Tranzfuser, the studio wouldn’t exist anymore.
It made me realize that you need that something, that reason to find the motivation, I think that the overarching motivation to create a studio and release our own games will never cease to exist but you need something more, especially for the short term, what is the motivation taking you from week to week, month to month and then ultimately year to year. We needed that motivation for the short term, to really put everything we had into the start and growth of the studio.
Make the hard choices
No one wants to, but you’ll go nowhere without doing so.
it is sort of where the title of this section comes into play, Losing out on Tranzfuser forced us to very quickly re-evaluate what we were, what we were doing and how we would sustain the studio. and that meant failing fast and making the tough calls: like putting the Time Rivals project to one side for a little while. We had to fail fast with the Time Rivals project to progress the studio as a whole. Stepping back from the sentimentality of a project, being realistic and really assessing what was best for the studio.
And this doesn’t just go for choices made for a project either, there are a lot of conversations and moments that will require tough choices. Having the ability to make those calls and also in a way that is mediated between the entire team is really important. We knew we needed to switch our focus over towards building on our client portfolio and delivering projects with specific requirements to a deadline, and wanted clients to be satisfied with our work so we could become a bigger name in the industry. Showing that we can provide a good service for our clients will only make it easier for us obtaining publishing agreements for the games we create in the future.
Now we are well stuck into client projects with more pencilled in for later in the year and starting to build the teams reputation and client portfolio. It’s a shame a lot of the work we are currently doing with clients is under NDA but soon enough we will have a case studies page with some nice projects to show on there, and more to share with our network.
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Here is a couple of photos from when the team took the trip over to Develop:Brighton to get involved with the event, featuring Khris and Jamie on the classic picture boards.
Oh... No one else knows that they are doing either...
Please don’t read this thinking its all been a breeze and the process of setting up a business and keeping it going even for 6 months isn’t a monumental task – let alone doing it alongside the creation of a video game which is an art form of its own.
Through out a lot of the last 6 months I’ve been confused, frustrated and working hard on just making sure I understand the fundamentals of what I’m doing, both for creating video games and client projects, as well as running a business which for a team with little to no background in business has been a massively difficult task. You could say at times the phrase “fake it till you make it” was actually quite applicable.
But after a lot of conversations with a lot of people who are definitely considered much more versed in the games industry than us, something we realised is that everyone else is also just figuring it out as they go along and its actually okay if you don’t quite know what you are doing and if anything, it means that I am probably on the path of growth, so bring on the unknown.
The last year working with the team has been crazy, the last 6 months starting a business together even more so. I have a lot more to talk about but we need to save something for future posts, right?
For now though, thanks for reading, hope you got something out of this post and see ya later.
Joe. C
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