Do what you love, and Love what you do

I’ve been trying to work with a group of fellow alumni on a game that will be our “break-in” indie game now that we’re out of school. We are following all the best advice on start-up studios, researching the business end of things as well as the development end, and laying the foundations of good communication.

You’ll notice I said “trying” to work. We hit a bit of a snag in the start that we shouldn’t have even run into. What was it? We tried to make a game that was logical for us to make, rather than something we WANTED to make. We opted for the safe bet rather than the dream. We should have known better… after all we got our degrees so we could make games we loved.

So what changed?

I was speaking with one of the lovely professors that so recently released us into the wild and he said we should come together as a team into a game we could all get behind. He said we’d crash and burn if we didn’t love what we were working on. (I’m paraphrasing of course.)

So I decided that we needed to find out what we all loved. There are six of us, and we’re working remotely, so finding common ground isn’t easy. I decided to go with a survey:

Looks simple, right? Sometimes it’s the simple things that trip us up, like trying to make a game that we didn’t care much about.

Turns out we ALL wanted to make RPGs (a few had multiple genres, but RPG was on everybody’s list.) We had been trying to make a RTS game. We also all loved the same general themes and periods. We trashed the RTS game completely and started over.

Now we are rolling. The over-arching story is fitting into place, the mechanics are being hashed out, and the technical details of platform and engine are being looked at. This is looking like it’ll be a great experience after all, and if all goes well a brand new indie studio will be rearing its head within the next year.

Watch for us. 😉