1 hour ago, Tony Li said:BTW, I noticed you wrote "maths." In the USA, people normally write "math." If you're in Canada or the UK, there are government and private funding programs such as the Canada Media Fund that fund indie games. Thought I'd mention it, although applicants generally need a strong team with a history of success already.
Thanks for that -
I'm based in Australia - I've read the community here is really thin as most people with talent end up exported to the US though right? However, simple research turns up that wages are about 20% less locally, and with the AUD/USD exchange rate US staff become 20% more than the sticker price. I will look into government grants further but when I searched about a month ago, all I read was people complaining there was no support from the government. From your perspective is there any reasonable talent in Australia, or is that outside your wheelhouse?
1 hour ago, Tom Sloper said:It depends. Do you look or sound like someone who knows something about business or management? For some more information on what you're up against, I wrote some articles. There's one on finances of game development, another on starting a game company, and others.
Ok that helps... If you have time to read, I would love to hear your assessment of how compatible my background would be with something like this project:
I work in Private Equity / Corporate Advisory, so my job is basically raising money for startups and providing advisory services around governance and prepping for capital raising. We typically raise between $2.5m - 30m depending on the size of the company, but our clients are institutional so they would not be interested in something like this. This role also bleeds over to marketing, sales and distribution strategy for companies we invest in.
I have also founded two companies with successful exits, one national "Tough Mudder" style events company and one mid-tier Financial Services / Private Wealth / Capital Markets firm. In those companies, the largest team I was managing directly was 20 staff, but they were all in sales, so very different to dealing with developers. For that reason, I am not confident enough to try project manage the game development process myself. I also have web applications (full stack) development experience, so I have been able to watch Unity tutorial videos and follow them. My concern is that I have a lot of domain experience in certain areas, but absolutely no clue about this industry.
Looking at it from a Private Equity perspective, my gut would tell me that I should not invest in an industry I don't understand. On the other hand, this concept is a huge passion for me and I've been thinking about it for years, and history tells me that when my gut is this confident on a concept (in my areas of domain expertise), I should execute.
What do you think, and with that context in mind, would you have any further advice?
1 hour ago, Tom Sloper said:You should let your technical wizard determine the proper engine for your game, don't you think?
Haha, very true! I just saw some demos and they looked amazing.
