Plan for Marvin Hawkins

Big Dreams


About a year and a half ago I released my first .plan. I was mistaken in what a .plan was for. I thought that that article should be my game company's unofficial business plan. The plan sounded more like ceasar adressing an empire than an actual strategy for sound company building....

NLG, as the business plan put it, was going to be at the forefront of indie game development by the end of 2004. I didn't discuss marketing, team management/ business operations, or even product development. I know that most indies don't think of these things, but if game development is any more than a hobby to you then you must plan. There is no way around it.

Reality Vs. Dreams

I wanted my company to be at the head of the game development universe by the end of last year. Only problem was, I didn't have a computer. In July of 2004 my computer decided to take what I'll call a creative break. At a little over a year old, It simply crapped out on me. What was worse was I had no back up system, no copies of the work that I had done so far and no way to fix the problem. Development was effectively halted before it could get out of the gates. I had also accumulated team members which were growing (understandbly so) impatient with the lack of visible progress. I myself was growing frustrated due to my inability to begin devleopment again. As the year ended I finally had fixed my computer problems but the teams were gone. They had decided to move on. I had planned for a bad scenario but not a disaster such as this. The worse problem in my risk management document was probably the loss of a key team member.

Moving On

With the start of 2005 I was motivated by new fervor to turn my hobbies into a company. For the first time I had decided to combine my love of videogames, writing, web design, and game development into a multi product/service company. Much like everything else im my life I wanted to do everything. And I wanted to d it all at once. As such Nothing Like it Games has risen from the ashes with a new focus.. No Empirical dreams, just fun games. I have also decided the time was now to revive a game news project I started as a kid. On top of that I decided I'm going to do web design while my first two planned games are in development. Strange as it seems all these elements tie into one another. Nothing Like it Games churns out the games, The Indie Game Guide mentions news of the game, and Marvin Hawkins Visual Concepts builds the web page.

New Focus

With a new (and most importantly) 'complete' business plan in hand I set about setting up my company. In March of this year I started buidling the company web site. I didn't realize how out of practice I was in regard to web design. It took me until april to build something that I wasn't ashamed of. Even now with the structure of the web site "complete" I still feel like I should somehow improve on its aestethics [sic]. I'm still working on the same two games that I was when Nothing Like it Games (part 1) went down. But now I see how they can be done and what the goals of the products are. Overall I feel like what I am doing is more than just a pipe dream and is something that I can ahieve.

Now What?

Since I've been getting a crash course in business planning and development at my own expense. I have learned one thing. If you want to get anywhere in business you have to plan for it. The days of winging it and hoping for the best are over. Now that's not to say you should over plan. Having a short attention span and a fervor for getting things done, I've found it best to quickly plan out a few steps and see if they actually fly. Similar to programming prototypes.

What's next for me?

Well after 8 months, I finally feel like I've throughly planned out my business. My plans will probably change but at least I have a better guess than I did last year. So hopefully I can start getting clients and making money. So that the business could be legitamately called a business by others.