The past two-three weeks have been
hectic, to say the least. Basically all our time have gone to two
things – finishing the prototype/demo, and concentrating hard on
writing pitch documents, treatments, and other documents on the
business side.
12 O’clock Studios attended the
excellent Nordic Game Conference ( http://nordicgame.com/
). Its not your typical conference – its a complete mash-up
between business, pleasure, and education. We went with the main
intent of finding and pitching our product for publishers for
long-term relationships, as well as meeting other game companies and
build a strong network – the saying goes that you’re only as big as
your network. One of the greatest things we signed up on was called
Pitch and Match. It is basically a match making service for business
meetings. We signed up and got to meet a dozen different companies –
publishers, tool and tech developers, venture capitalists, and
distributors. A full day, packed with 30minute pitch meetings was
extremely fun, but also very tiring. We got really good response on
our product – and some very good constructive criticism. Much of
the criticism was very uplifting to hear and opened up some good
questions that we have put our bright minds to figuring out. The best
feeling we had was after the conference when we discussed our
meetings and realised that every meeting had given us something –
either some form of insight, some criticism to our idea, or actual
business to follow up on. It was a fantastic feeling. We also
attended a very nice networking mingle called the Nordic – Canada
Partnership Mingle. It was an open invitation to seek out
partnerships with studios in Canada. This is something that we will
look into in the coming weeks.
When we returned we had our hands full
juggling follow up mails and properly documenting all the feedback we
received into some sort of manageable pile. We have been going at it
since we returned. We have managed to not only set up all our
internal documentation in a nice manner, but also collect all the
pitching material we are going to send out – hopefully later this
week – and while we were documenting we wrapped up all our initial
documentation for our next product as well. It has felt strange
taking time from actual game development. I think its good to come
out and do different things, least of all to get some perspective on
what you are doing at work. It is like being so zoomed in into a
speciality that you start living in a bubble. Bursting that bubble
has been a pure pleasure. Oh, and we got a hold of a dozen old
computers that were building into a render farm for when we simulate
realistic lighting during development – next week we’ll take it for
a spin!
I’ve also been reading some books that
I’d like to recommend. Eric Ries fantastic “The Lean Startup” (
amzn.to/GHlebV), and Karen Berman
and Joe Knights “Financial Intelligence” ( amzn.to/Li0tE1 ).
More on Lean in another post.