Hello everyone and welcome to another month I get the great pleasure of being able to review!
This one might be a bit smaller, as the month has been mostly occupied with bringing top secret work around to an eventual release!
On the Hunt For Tax Accountants
For quite a number of months now, I’ve been on an Accounting spree in order to create the foundation to apply for the SR&ED tax rebate program. This program gives a return in taxes on the salaries spent on labour that pertain specifically to work that can be considered, in our case, the &ED part, Experimental Development. This, of course, means that we actually have to DO our taxes to make the claim and get a return. Makes complete sense.
However, I was under a grave assumption this past 16 years of Genome operation.
You still have to file taxes on 0 income.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaah. That means that I haven’t been claiming income tax for 16 years due to a mistaken idea of how all that stuff works!
This came rolling in full force when I now had to get someone to file my taxes for the previous 15 years in preparation for the SR&ED filing.
This resulted in basically having to spend the amount, and even more, that I’d get from SR&ED JUST on the accounting to FILE for SR&ED. What an utter mess.
Ultimately, this has to be done one way or another. So, as collateral damage to be cleared up by the application itself, it’s pretty okay as a result… it just means that the funds can’t be put towards my many, many legal and contractor fees I’ve been undertaking in order to fully work through the needs of our product development and other operations.
But, ouch. Ooouuuch.
Over the month, I slowly worked my way through the most viable options to mitigate the sheer brunt of the impact of this.
On a list of worst to best, I started with a $3300 per annum fee. For 16 years, that would land at 52,800 dollars… A year’s salary for many. Completely and utterly untenable; that would bankrupt me immediately.
Something that gets quite interesting about your corporate income tax is, you can claim the expenses spent on behalf of the company’s operation. This can be computer hardware, furniture and office equipment, software subscriptions, salary and contracting, domain hosting, and even legal and registry fees to do your legally mandated government stuff.
What’s significant about this is that if your company has no money, and thus you were the one who paid for all these expenses, you get to record them in your corporate books as a founder’s loan. This means that your company owes you the money you spent over that time. What makes it special is that that money was already taxed when you earned it. So now, with this debt to you, if you eventually make money (wouldn’t that be nice), you can withdraw it as a return on the debt, and it comes to you tax-free!
A very valuable reason to do your corporate income tax and report all your expenses thoroughly.
Next? $800 per annum.
At 16 years, that lands me at 4,800 dollars. Far more digestible. But nearly eats up my entire refund. Not quite, but still makes a significant impact on it. And one of the complicated things is that for this 16th year, I am paying myself salary. Which means it’s more complicated than previous years. So that means that final year could very well be much more than just 800 dollars. Slowly nudging that price up until it consumes my entire return.
Hopefully there’s ANYTHING lesser than that, because it’s such a bummer to have to commit so much work and effort for the SR&ED application to receive nearly nothing usable by the end.
Filing Software, a bastion in the storm.
We were then able to find a Tax Filing Software that was able to file that far back. Turns out that’s not always possible. One listed in the Canadian Revenue Agency software list. Future Tax.
At $75~, this is falling FAR closer to something workable. Takes a bit of elbow grease, but sparing that to not go bankrupt? Pretty good deal for me.
Hold up, this is ALBERTA Taxes
Where… unlike other provinces, you need to file TWO submissions for each tax year. Federal and Provincial separately… that turns this tax filing from 16 to 32! Ohhh myyyy…… ugggghhhhhhh.
So. $75 at 32 filings is 2,400 dollars. Still significantly more survivable. But JEEEEZ, the sheer amount of work is ridiculous, all to say I spent 75 bucks on web hosting 13 years ago…
The incredible grace of living in Canada…
Then, there was one last Hail Mary I took.
Canada Revenue Agency has a “Tax Liaison” organization that gives you free advice on how to file your taxes for small business or self-employment.
This turned out to be a miracle and full of enormously helpful information.
Of note:
– Bam, Alberta only wants filings that are non-nil, a year that has no revenue. Drastically reducing the number of filings I need to do. Phew.
– Boom, there’s a “Short T2” Filing form that’s 2 pages instead of… mmm-pages. Woah.
– Those “Short T2” filings can STILL include your expenses and other details.
– And they can be self-filed, so they’re free. That is such a boost.
– Lastly, if you sign up for the GST program, despite not making the 30k threshold for automatic enrolment. You can claim all the GST in your expenses and have it returned to you. If I had done that in 2010, I would have been able to receive a reimbursement of all the GST spent on everything since.
So I was advised to sign up for that the moment I hung up the call. Which I certainly did.
The drawback is that everything you sell you now need to claim GST on, instead of having to wait till that 30k threshold… oh well, good practice anyways.
So this accounting was finally dropped to a survivable rate.
With some help from my family, who have run small businesses, I’ve been able to properly record my expenses into proper bookkeeping categories, work through the fort-dozen claims, and do it only for the cost of mailing it in and filling the forms themselves.
This is such a victory for us because there’s no way to proceed as a company without doing these things anyways. So it would have come up one way or another. And now, we can divert the saved expenses to the actual stuff we desperately need to also prop up in order to be on the straight and narrow as an operating business.
So then stonks.
Yes, part of this whole effort has been to also properly allocate and disburse stock. Equity. It’s an easy enough concept when you’re on the ground talking about XYZ number of shares, and that’s an amount of a total number of shares… But then it gets wonky… well… everywhere else and in every other form.
Much like bookkeeping, there is what’s called a “Minutes Book”, which is a log of all the legal activity you’ve undertaken as a business from day one. This is meant to be maintained and continually added to as more and more things get done by your business. Shares DEFINITELY being one of them.
Wellp. That’s something your lawyer needs to do… and what my lawyer needed to do… and what I needed to pay my lawyer to do…
Next, there’s a funny detail where even if you’re granting someone shares in your business as compensation, there needs to be a material transfer to officiate the exchange. Basically, from what I understand, you’re selling the shares to your person for one cent per share, and then they get their thousands of shares. The money exchange ensures that it’s actually recorded as exchanged and that it happened…
But then there’s the accounting of it. You then need to log the exchange of the shares, but then also record the shares as though the transfer was of the commercial value of the shares… This is mostly paraphrasing, as it’s a very complicated thing I’m only just faintly knowledgable on. But yeah… everything needs a record…
I’m sure actually SELLING stock is a bit simpler, as that monetary exchange IS the thing. It’s no longer compensation, just selling stock. But jeez, who knows how that all starts to go once you start diluting your shares to properly distribute to more investors and things like that as your business grows…
Needless to say I’ve been VERY stressed out.
Like VERY. Stressed. Out.
But!
We’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and all the business things will be shored up, and it’ll be MUCH smoother sailing from here on out.
Quick Action List for if you’re going to start a business as a “promise” and hold onto it for 16 years:
– Incorporate with your business name. Make sure it’s not too close to a company with similar business.
– Make sure whomever does your incorporation ensures that the minute book is ready and able.
– Maybe don’t do Alberta if you can help it?
– Sign up for your voluntary GST account with the government. Claim all GST from expenses.
– Now expect to have to pay $100 every year for your annual return. (But you can claim that as an expense!)
– Expect to do a short filing while you make 0 dollars.
– Keep ALLL your expense invoices, receipts, and records from here on out.
– Use the liaison officers to help advise on ANY of this stuff before you assume or make moves on anything you don’t know for sure.
Then, expect for all this to get massively more complicated when you start making an income, but hopefully if you’re an artist fartist and don’t make a profit for 16 years, you can have this all ready for when you actually mobilize. No 16-years-later surprise.
Or, just don’t incorporate until you have to. That works too. Probably a lot better.
Now to the fun stuff that all this stress is for!
Fun might be a bit of a stretch… But sure is better than feeling like you’re going to jail all day, every day, for weeks on end… and still do…
We’re in the final stretch of our project! Like. We’re running out of things to tackle; what’s left is some of the fussiest most small things, the software is not changing as drastically and won’t for the time being… We’re in the 90% of the 90% of the 90%. Soooo sooo close there.
To that ends, I’ve been on QA duty!
Yay QA! I get to suss out all the tiny, minor missing things and bugs that we missed! Which can be a big bummer, because for every issue you stir up, more work needs to come in to actually secure it all and have it ready for release.
It can also be a bummer that one person is bringing out all these issues and the other has to take it and bring in a bunch of fixes. It’s a team sport, but can feel a little mean to fuss every last thing.
BUT WE’RE IN THE BUSINESS OF HIGH STANDARDS OF QUALITY!
And none of what is cropping up is “nice-to-haves”. We are precisely and targetedly bringing out things that are preventing us from release. If something extra comes up, we log it as such and treat it with that priority, but the stuff holding us back is simply the minimum to bring out a truly professional work.
Rolling forward a bit. “Don’t be a Trust Me Bro” popped up again.
I was asked to speak at August’s Game Camp Edmonton meetup. My “Don’t be a Trust Me Bro” presentation was well received at the NAIT Level Up! Student Conference, and one of our Edmonton community members was advocating hard for me to speak again at this more general meetup.
It was sickeningly stressful for me, as it’s been 4 months since I’d last done the presentation, and I’ve been far more occupied with stressful tax things to also tack on a presentation at a specific deadline, no take-sy back-sies.
So I ventured to catch back up and get back into motion with the presentation. Took me 2 days of intensive grilling to pick up the cadence and pace of the presentation again. When delivered potently and precisely, it takes 55 minutes on the dot. Any stammering and losing track pushes that time further to the 1 hour hard limit. It’s a very high-tension presentation…
And this time around? I’ve been completely blank-minded. Watching the recording of that presentation, I was stunned at how much explanation and metaphor was captured within each point of the presentation. I’m not just logging a list of bullet points. Each point has meaning behind it.
Wowza, in the state I was in, I could have done the presentation in 20 minutes just blankly repeating core statements… Not great…
But after watching the recording 3 times, practicing the presentation through 4 times… all taking 1 hour to do… I managed to pick up the rhythm and depth… Don’t ask me how, because I was PANICKING leading up to presentation day. It was only by finishing my last test presentation round at like 4 pm (3 hours before showtime) that I was like… well, it’ll be as good as it’ll be…
BUT. I mention this for another reason, actually.
As I’ve shared in the past, now that I’ve made that presentation on being a trust me bro, I can no longer pretend like I don’t know the lessons and meaning behind what it means to grow out of being a trust me bro and into an active professional. We all have rough edges, for certain, but there are MANY things we are tempted to do to cop out and make things easy for ourselves.
Now, by not being a trust me bro, I have to face the hardships and reality of actually doing the real work, all the way through.
What’s been interesting about it, however, is how it’s actually impacting me through the process.
Back when I was working on Rube Goldberg Workshop, we were getting to the end of it. At the time, while I understood why, I was SOOOOOO agitated to have to follow through on everything. I was being grilled from all sides with issues and needs and fixes, and my manager was insisting I actually do all the work and bring it ALLLL around. How absurd.
Again, I knew what’s up, but in my chest I was struggling SOO hard. Just a million “UGH, why does it MATTER” issues piling up as I was sooo done with the project by then.
This time round?
I am not having that at all. The relationship I had to that great scrutiny from the GM had profoundly impacted me in my work beyond. I held myself to account during the Awaken Guardian work I had tackled in 2025, which was some of the best work I’ve ever done; and now is no different.
As we’re grilling this project, whether it’s bliss or not, we’re not wrestling with the desire to just wrap it and cut off that final work and get it out. That’s not even remotely tickling us with temptation.
As in this diagram from my presentation, the desire to just float across the hard work to skip the discomfort of the real process is no longer a temptation.
Instead, there’s this exciting and rewarding… I don’t even know how to explain it. Duty, Pride, Eagerness… To do the full job all the way.
While it’s KILLING us to have to delay things to get it done right, there’s no doubt whatsoever to just tackle it sooner rather than later and get something shining and complete and stable together that more truly reflects our conviction towards doing the type of work that actually starts to move you up the board. We have big aspirations, and if we want to cut the corners that cut us short on that goal, then it’s going to take us ages to actually grow to the capacity we need to be to be able to confidently represent our dreams and visions for the work we want to do. Without it, you’re just not there and CAN’T have that conviction… or at least you won’t be trusted with it.
Today and every day, we ARE going to make exceptional work, no more excuses.
And to that point, we’ve been finalizing colour themes for everything, finalizing our site, finalizing branding, and really tapping into the tone surrounding the product.
We’re bringing around the final needs for our branding guidelines and press materials.
We’ve been getting all the legalities covered. Before, and into the software…
We’ve tackled distribution, downloading, updating, entering the software, working through the whole system, finishing, and closing.
The work we’re now edging into is FINALLY working out the fine details of the release itself! It’s going to be so cool to bring it all the way through the gates. No compromises. Targeted and precise.
Sure, we’re ready to receive issues and support things on release, but that will be work for the “and beyond” part of the release. Up to, we will be putting out, with pride and confidence, a true representation of that long-term vision for Genome Studios.
So, I also did other things in my month, surprisingly.
Yeah. I honestly felt that what I shared above was basically it. Felt like I lost a month…
Gladiators Multiplayer!
I won’t get into any fine details, but in the wake of the fun things I got going with Gladiators last month, I also chugged forward with trying to see if I could get a multiplayer layer working.
And I did, and it’s live! You can actually hit up the Gladiators Site, get your friends to too, then launch a multiplayer lobby, and they can join by code!
One of the worst parts of all this is my legacy work on the game. Insofar as I had developed, the ENTIRE game was also bound to the visual playboard. Including button presses, animations completing… the works.
So actually making a server-authoritative board state in data, then properly representing actions and intentions both from players and CPU’s without the graphical board, and then feeding that back to the actual visualized game board was a total mess… I mean, it still is, really.
BUT! It’s there! And you can give feedback on the experience whether you play a 4-player round or with CPU’s. All of which allows me to review it as I have the spare energy, and see if fixes can be made to get it working more completely.
So far, it’s… okay…
Hope y’all had your vegetables!
I was later deeply tempted by a bunch of talk in the O3DE Discord Server regarding the Vegetation System. Although it’s WAY down the pipes, Awaken Guardian is SUPER dependent on a staggeringly rich vegetation environment. The entire game being played, essentially, outside.
Back in my Unity days, I had an incredible Vegetation System that is no longer available. I can still use it, as I paid for it, but no longer for anyone else. Obviously, it is also not an O3DE tool.
So, really, there’s using the premade one, which was one of the last parts of O3DE being made while it was being open-sourced and majority developed by Amazon. This means that it just had a hard stop in feature and function development and simply needed to be capped off in a functional state.
This obviously means that it was way underbaked and, unfortunately, remains that way since most of the contributors have been building the foundational systems and stability. Vegetation being a far outlier into the nice-to-haves, not quite essential to the immediate needs and future of O3DE.
So I began the process of understanding the differences between that Unity system and the vegetation system already in place.
Fortunately, there were a lot of systems already available in O3DE to facilitate the high capacity vegetation we all want it to carry.
One of which is mesh instancing, currently only an optional mass “all” toggle, but it does in fact allow for proper instancing of meshes/materials and gives a performance jump.
Another that was eked out was Indirect rendering. Turns out that it exists in the codebase, but no native source code that I could find actually USES it; another highly important one for vegetation.
There were, however, some major concerns in the O3DE system. The most problematic is that it currently only facilitates Entity spawning. That is, spawning a prefab for, say, “tree”, which is an entire entity, mesh component, material component, and anything else needed to make a tree… a collider or particle, for example.
This is NOT scalable. Vegetation systems ALWAYS have a rendering pooling system where it handles creating an enormous amount of meshes with materials into a giant pooled shader that utilizes every possible layer of performance optimization to properly depict multiple thousands of assets at once.
Where a prefab takes part is in the literal IMMEDIATE vicinity around the player, where the most immediate elements get swapped for a prefab to enable the leaves delicately falling from the branches as particles, for the colliders to appear and make the tree solid… the works. Everything outside of that highly constrained ring? All graphical and nothing more.
This is where things began to diverge, and it ultimately made more sense to just roll with my needs than try to gingerly alter the source Vegetation system and ask permission all along the way.
Due to that, I was able to deploy my own authoring scheme of creating single vegetation item assets. Each uniquely defined tree, and bush, and grass, along with the attributes of their functionality, their alpha-masked pieces, their regular PBR pieces, etc. Then, a greater “Biome” asset. The catalogue of countless vegetation items along with the entire array of placement rules and criteria.
Much to my delight, I was able to utilize a VERY common pattern I’ve used all over GS_Play, which is to break core placement functionality into their own “placement rules” class type, so that any vegetation can be populated with ANY placement rules, but any that are not included take no part in the size of the data. This is unlike many vegetation systems where slope, and scatter, and texture mask, and whatever else are just a massive endless array on EVERY vegetation, even if most of them are just disabled.
This makes the biome only as big as it has to be, and the simplest vegetation is literally the simplest collection of data they need. Big win.
One of the last big schisms was between cellular placement and sector-driven placement. The source veg system uses sectors. Large square tiles that carry the entirety of their configuration. This ends up with massive chunk actions of spawning and despawning the vegetation, which is cumbersome to a streaming world, while the random rules end up playing out more generically per sector in that the variance is very consistent between sectors. This is in contrast to cells which can carry clusters of, say, the high and low outcomes of a biome’s ruleset, and it’s not a problem, as the aggregate of cells impacted by any biome, or combination of biomes, actually reflect the consistency of the ruleset on a larger scale.
Some final features I thought were cool:
The vegetation masking can be facilitated by the landscape canvas masks. More importantly, as far as I’ve been able to research, you can place “Stamps” in the world that can define a biome in a particular space, on demand. Meaning you can spawn something that also has a vegetation mask as part of its entity hierarchy, which then means procedural gen processes can additively build out an entire vegetation layout reactively to the procedural generation. All very necessary to Awaken Guardian’s system needs.
Check it out!
This was mostly a side project, as really, this vegetation system is a FAR-distant feature set for some very high-calibre game production. But in a month of high stress and working on what’s needed and not what is actually fun, it was a very refreshing rabbit hole to dive into and see what plays out.
My own asset pipeline is grossly underprepared for this system, and it is very raw and sparsely capable, so it’s nothing that can be mobilized on. But I love laying the foundation, because I can then poke at things that will eventually support it better, and perhaps I can find myself able to make a comprehensive and deeply complex Awaken Guardian vegetation environment sooner than I had thought!
Uhh, actually that seems to be it!
A long and short review, but I hope it’s been meaningful nonetheless.
We are certainly VERY ready to move forward and prioritize GS_Play development head-on and in full focus. We did, in fact, get into this business to make cool media at the end of the day. We truly hope that this work we’re putting into action now can set a strong precedent for the work to come. We’re not babies anymore, that’s for sure.
Stay tuned for next month; I have a good feeling about it.
Thanks, as always, for following along and watching us build and grow; it means the world.
Till then!
Btw, you can now rep Genome Studios on Discord with our brand new shiny server tag! Every bit counts!
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