Hello All! I almost forgot the month rolled over! Happy Canada Day to all you Canadians!
June has been a month of upheaval and big decisions, a heavy hitter when it comes to disrupting plans and driving pivots. This is Gaian, and I’ll be taking you along our June journey in review!
So whats been going on?
First and most prominently, we’ve had to make the tough decision to step away from Open 3D Engine for our first push towards our game productions. It wasn’t a decision taken lightly, but unfortunately the pipelines for art and presentation was far too under-developed for us to proceed with. Being such a grassroots team we don’t have the resources to split our efforts between engine expansion and our own productions. It was a morale hit for our programming team, who are all very excited that Open 3D Engine is free and open source (FOSS). But making the change was also a huge morale increase for our art team, who were getting quite tense at the limitations present in the current workflows of the engine. These are the complicated and very starkly real decisions that come in the wake of building a game studio from the ground up. The ultimate decision was based on building up a foundation of capital in order to enable Genome Studios to pursue more visionary goals in the future, a broke company is not one that is able to make plans for future goals.
With that being said, we are not removing ourselves from the O3DE ecosystem, we’re simply falling a bit more dormant on active development. We still very strongly believe in what O3DE offers the game development world and want to follow it as it expands and grows. I was also able to break through my many tasks and pull together two new O3DE Intensives! The first Intensive was on some updates to the character controller, as was covered in the very first Intensive, followed by one all around rotation: Character rotation, camera rotation, and camera relative input direction rotation! It should be enough to get users able to make a character that can be controlled by many different means, but with all the expected behaviour of turning to look in the direction they are going.
This Month has also been another one very focused around gathering investment sources and applying and pitching to compete for the chance to build up a small pad of income to bolster development efforts.
I’ve had to do a lot of growing and adapting to my role as studio head, there is a very stark difference in responsibilities and positioning of perspective between an “indie game developer” and an “indie games business founder”. Being responsible for the continued life of the company and building up the ability to get prospecting team mates funded to start contributing their work towards projects fundamentally changes how one needs to look at the business and what you do in the day to day. It requires hard looks at what you’re doing and making tough decisions like the ones abundant throughout this month, even when the starry eyed game dev inside your heart would decide to the contrary. Like I said above, only a funded and running studio has the ability to make dreamy, visionary, goals and plans for the future and it’s up to the foundry to make that an actual reality. It can be very hard, and emotional, as has been the case throughout my recent vlogs, but it’s a necessity of the job.
So back to the hard work this month!
With all this new responsibility now firmly on my agenda, I applied to the Conceptualization CMF program. It’s a much smaller fund with far more lenient requirements for approval. It’s a valuable strategy as a Canadian game studio to lightly diversify your projects by suspending a few at differing stages of completion. The Conceptualization Stream is the first inception stage of a project, contrary to Prototyping, which has far more complicated requirements and needs a project far further in realization. Having done the Prototyping stream back in April was an incredible boon to my ability to build this new application. The common details of company history, team CV’s and descriptions, financial status and so much more were all already done in vastly more detail than was required for this tiny application. Really, the hardest part was in shrinking all the info to fit into the application! Because of the precedence set by that first application I was able to pull this conceptualization application together over the weekend with a brief review before submitting.
That ease was something that ended up playing very significantly into our final submission. We had originally anticipated that the program would be up and around for a few months, as is normal with the Conceptualization stream, however, on the opening day of the 2024 intake the program was FLOODED with applications. So much so that the program officers were sounding off to all sorts of orgs across Canada raising alarms to apply as soon as possible, a message that made its way to me. Thankfully, because we had so much pre-prepared, and understood the kind of “grant application language” we needed to realize, we were able to expedite our submission goals of “some time this week” to “TODAY, RIGHT NOW!”. This development comes loaded with extra confounding factors though. The program is built to accept ALL submissions made on opening day, even if it overextends the budget for the program. As far as I’ve heard if the program overfills the budget will start to dilute between all the applicants, meaning that the maximum of 15,000 Canadian Dollars available to applicants will start to scale down until the budget meets the number of applicants. This scaling fund may cause a lot of complications with the actual goals of the application, as it’s only enough to have a few people contribute part-time to conceptualizing the project over a few months at most. Now I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth, it’s an incredible opportunity for startup developers in Canada to begin the process of founding their studios, funding their projects, and being able to put some funds towards their goals, in legal, banking, and in the workforce. All the things you need to start understanding the business side of your game development dreams.
This development in the program however, speaks to the current climate of the video games industry in Canada. In light of the many layoffs that have happened over the past few years, and with the still ever growing games industry as a whole, there is an immense demand from indie studios for funds to begin founding their projects and companies. This means that there’s an extreme competitive climate here in Canada over very finite resources available to kickstart our studios. I’m not sure how the dust will settle, but no doubt there will be a large influx of strong standing studios that have made it through the gauntlet and have made it on top, and many more who will not.
In Conclusion
Now, as we enter July, we will start to hear the results of our many efforts to apply for these funding programs, which will determine the course we take moving forward. Without a doubt we are expecting things to develop unexpectedly, but still plan to drive forward none the less. These are the hard knocks of business foundry, and in such a subjective and competitive environment such as video games it’s exactly what one should expect.
Regardless of how things develop, we aim to be back for the July in Review with all sorts of stories to share. We hope to see you there!