Postmortems From Game Developers

Section I: STARTUPS 2Startups typically have a few enormous advantages,which we’ll see repeated in the pages tocome:Youth. Young, enthusiastic teams, willing towork long hours for low salaries.No bureaucracy. When the whole companyfits into one office and your CEO is alsoyour lead programmer, communicationhappens faster.Low overhead. Lean and mean companieshave a low burn rate, especially when you’reworking out of someone’s parents’ livingroom.Freedom. Until you’ve made a distributiondeal, you call the shots—you can make thegame you want to make, not the one you gothanded because upper managementmanaged to score the interactive licensingrights to a 70s TV show.New company culture. It’s a chance to formyour own company culture and try out newmodels of game development, instead ofinheriting them from an older company’sbureaucracy. You design the work pipeline,organizational chart, greenlight processyourself, and change them right away if theydon’t work out.There are also some perilous downsides:Rookie management. Software development isan enormously complex task, almost adiscipline in itself. Screwing it up can havegrievous costs in time, money, and quality.No money. Unless you have a sweetheart dealfrom the start, you’ll be running on ashoestring budget, conceivably angstingabout making payroll.Overtasking. Everyone seems to be inagreement that small teams work better formany projects, but this can mean teammembers wear multiple hats. The problem iscompounded when the same people arerunning the business and administration of asmall company.Overambition. Sometimes total freedom canbe too much of a good thing. Big-companystructures that force you to make milestonesand ship product can be necessary discipline,ensuring that you cut unnecessary featuresand that someday you actually put theproduct in a box and ship it.New company culture. A project being run atan existing firm already has guidelines andan outline of how to build a game. Thesecan be a hindrance, but they can also be theroad map that gets you through unknownterritory.Here are a few of the lessons that can be drawnfrom them:• There’s more than one way to form astartup.Bohemia Interactive and Surreal Softwareboth took the traditional garage-band route,but there are other models. Some developmenthouses start small, just doing ports ofexisting games, or add-on packs—you don’tnecessarily have to reinvent the wheel. Maybesomeone has a gee-whiz piece of technologythat needs a game built around it. Maybe aproject team detaches from an existing company,then contracts with the parent