Hooie and hello everyone! It’s been a pretty hefty two months and the dust has only just begun to settle enough for me to get back to you with this multi-month in review! This is Gaian and I’ll be your shepherd through this weighty review!
Let’s start WAY back in April. You fools.
Entering April, we were already starting our first draft of our Canada Media Fund application for the Prototyping Stream. That’s the middle funding bracket where you’ve already conceptualized your project but need to build it up to actually see if it will make a fun and feasible game worth bringing into full-blown Production, the last stage of funding provided by Canada Media Fund.
What I didn’t know at this time was the sheer degree of competition I was going to be facing in this program. You see, I was under the assumption that because these programs are meant to stimulate growth in the Canadian Culture sector, that it would be something oriented around partial concepts, artistry, and passionate teams willing to realize it into something more tangible.
No. Not by a long shot. This fund is a competitive pool of entrants. Meaning that the funds are finite, and get distributed to the best entries until the fund is out for this intake. That means that there’s no static “you succeed if you make it to this score”, rather it’s relative to how well every other entry does. This means that you’re building an application with a case that needs to argue EVERY POSSIBLE value you can provide because even quarter points may be the thing that divides you from success or failure.
The draft I sent to our consultants came back scathing. “I don’t know what you’re saying here.”, “This doesn’t sound unique or original.”, “The team doesn’t sound capable from these descriptions.”, “don’t use fanciful wording”, and more was the general view of the entire application. Engage freakout.
No, don’t engage freakout. Appreciate what you’re trying to do. Submit a sterling application selling every aspect of you, your team, your company, and your project as though it’s gods gift to the world. No matter how uncomfortable that feels to do. Its simply the cost of doing business. So instead of freaking out apply yourself to doing a true job at it. A real attempt. This application is no side thing. It’s an absolute necessary deliverable to meet for your company, so treat it as such.
So in this light we shifted our attitude in April towards hard dedicated work. And unfortunately a lot of crunch. I, with the incredible help of my Partner, spent days, nights, and weekends working beyond full time on the application. We densified everything, refined all our included mechanics and features, added more elements and aspects of the game with the newly gained space, argued everything with very concrete and matter-of-fact language. We got feedback from mentors, completely revised sections of the application, and otherwise toiled over it non stop.
This was basically the entire body of my work over the past 2 months. It also became the object of a lot of very uncomfortable and frustrated vlogs covering my stress and experiences working on the application, crunching when no-crunch has been a literal selling feature of Genome Studios from the start, risk averse investment, and the hit to confidence with how fully one needs to articulate your game project business when it’s only a concept right now. I certainly hope that it reveals that indie game business is not just some ephemeral, romantic, dream, but also an incredibly challenging and demanding pursuit that truly tests you at times.
Additionally, we’ve had some team mates chugging away at work behind the scenes as well, but I’ll cover that a little later.
Wrapping up the CMF Application in May.
So returning back to the CMF Prototyping Odyssey, we enter May. Still working on it, now in the stage where you’re changing a sentence by a few words to try and pull it back by one additional line without destroying the subject of the statement… boy does this part of it kill me. But we’re pressing on.
Our documents are filling in, full of substance, have a nice backsplash image for the document, and are selling our team and project without using promotional language. This is now starting to stand as a true contender. An actual attempt at getting on the leaderboard.
But here’s where things get a little interesting. All that crunch I did leading up to this? The month and a half of crunch? It meant we actually finished about a week early. Le gasp. And that early completion allowed us to dedicate the last week towards unexpected developments and complications in submission. We created an invaluable runway to finalizing and submitting our application.
And even then in the final minutes when I was reviewing the application with our consultant before submission we still came accross a few mistakes that I got to correct. Thankfully with some rest and no other conflicting factors at hand, making it very simple and easy to overcome.
And so we submitted on time, with a solid package worthy of this attempt.
Now we wait.
So back to the rest of the team!
While all this franctic application writing was happening, we had some team mates chipping away at some really awesome work!
Our Principal Engineer, Shauna, has been getting further and further integrated into the O3DE Tech stack and ended up releasing an article on her first experiences taking on the engine on her blog, here. This is the first of many technical overviews of the engine, and our game dev tech as well.
Though not as easily showable, our GS_Play suite of gameplay tools and features is slowly starting to take form, shifting away from raw prototypes into the first versions of the scaffolding that will house an excitingly versatile and robust set of tools for our future development. I can’t wait to start being able to show off some of it in future dev dives!
That’s not all folks! We’ve also been doing some very cursory environmental development work. I’m happy to share that we’ve been working with an incredibly skilled 3D Artist, Saman, and he’s been doing fantastic R&D into the 3D art pipeline for our work.
Just check out these mocks of our modular assets at work. They’re gorgeous. And they are just early tests!
All this work gets us very quickly towards building up some prototype levels and dungeons, and allows us something to build our Art Direction out from. Now that I’ve been spared from the Application Writing gauntlet I’m getting so excited to reintegrate with the team and start putting all this new work into action.
Now that the dust has settled, what’s in store for Genome Studios?
In the wake of our application submission we have a very articulated definition of what our project is aiming to be, and what we will have to deliver on if we get approved for the program, which means we have a very stark image of where we are and eventually need to be.
Our goals, while things are all still up in the air, are to tackle as many unknowns and proofs we’ll need to move forward on this or ANY projects. What I’ve learned in the process of the application writing has shown that we need to take this time seriously now so that when the application comes in, successful or not, we will have spent the time getting ahead so we can hopefully have a healthy runway into the turbulent and transition-laden reality of what will come. It’s a lot easier said than done, but I hope that just being aware of it will mean we are taking better steps towards those ends with as little waste as possible.
This period should be a blast though, as we get our legs in the work we’re starting, as worrisome mysteries get solved, and as our tech, art, and design start to become fleshed out enough to be inter-mingled for some actual experience and effect. I look forward to the fun we will, hopefully, be having in working on all of it!
Here’s to a fruitful and exciting June! Thanks as always for coming along for the ride!