Plan for Phil Carlisle

I learnt a lot at IGC this year. Stuff that I had first considered and then rejected came up again.

One of the things I took away was that I realised I wanted to do more but that I was overcommited for my own time. Essentially I'd started down this path the year before at IGC when I realised I'd need help finishing any projects and that I'd have to pay to get that.

Now I've had some time to work with contractors with mixed feelings about the whole process. Some have been great, others have been less so and its a matter of luck how well one works with them. I guess I should have learnt this from my own experience in the building trade and seeing how contractors worked there. It was often down to the specific day or hour that the same guy could produce both amazing quality work and really appalling quality work. There was really no way to indentify wether that particular day would see amazing results or appalling results.

So having learnt that I still need to rely on contractors to do work, having seen how hit and miss it was. I got to thinking about how to mix in the contractor concept with the idea of funding and releasing my own portfolio of games. Games that feed a niche and yet are still commercially viable. Because I'd be funding these things, it still has to be very small in scope.

Luckily, the feedback this year from Jay is that we should be seeing MORE of the smaller 2D style games, so hey, there's an opportunity there.

Now thinking forward from this position, my biggest risk in this case is to create high quality projects, in a small timescale, using contracted resources.

So I start considering it from a different point of view. What resources do I have access to where I can positively vet the contractor, where I know they produce acceptable work and where I've got a good feeling for them delivering on time?

Yeah, you guessed it.. my students!

So this week is seeing the setup of my initial attempts at acting as part fund-manager part-producer part-cheerleader for a couple of small student teams. This means that essentially I pay for development, costs, artwork, I do part production and make sure that the quality is there. I supply anything that needs to be there for them to work properly. They supply the time and effort required to ship.

This means that the students get a twofold bonus of 1) shipping a game 2) getting some money

This is of course, highly experimental. I think these guys I'm working with show promise and I'm pairing them up on projects so that if one bails, the other has a good chance of carrying the project on by themselves. It gives them a place to get some peer feedback and allows them some mutual support. But it still is a hell of a risk.

When you think about it, this is PRIME time for them. Either they are still studying or have just finished and need a demo to get a bigger gig. This is THE time you should be stepping up and making something ready for release. So they get the benefit of an experienced guy helping them out, they get the support of paid-for high quality professional artwork to polish the project once its near completion, they get the safety of someone making sure they get paid for thier effort no matter what.

So come next year, I'll be hopefully showing off some student based works that have been on sale here at GG. Hopefully some of these guys have either gone on to bigger things, or have started on thier own or joined with me fulltime. I'm hoping we can detail some of the progress as we go. It will definitely be an interesting experiment even if it all goes horribly wrong.

So wish us luck guys. I dont want to pre-empt the projects, or the people involved posting about thier experiences. But I hope that this will give us all a nice little project to move forward with.

Till next time, when I'll be doing some analysis of casual games design.