Do you think you have the next hit video game that will sell millions of copies? That you can make video games better than the current ones on the market? Have you ever thought about or taken into consideration the blood, sweat, and tears involved in not only making your own game, but starting your own company to get it made?
Last September I wrote and developed a video game that I fell in love with, and started researching how to get it made or sell the intellectual property. After further schooling and research, no publisher I could find was looking to buy an IP or license it to develop either -- it's too high a risk. They're looking for other companies to invest in, potentially by the millions, to make sure the game gets made on time and within budget, and that the risk on investment isn't too great. So I decided to start my own game company, Faramix Enterprises LLC, because I realized that starting a real company was the only viable way to get my video game on the market.
What I want to share with others is a true sense of what it takes to start a company and make a game. Beyond what you read in the postmortems of games from established studios, building a game and starting a company require deep personal sacrifices.
Video Game Content and Coordination
Creating a video game is a long and difficult process, and there are certain steps that one must follow in a particular order. For example, the designs and storyline have to be created before an artist can get an idea of what to draw. Before artists draw character sketches, they need to know about the characters, such as their height, weight, and personalities. Even though the characters might be left up to the artists' imagination, the artists need a basic outline to build from.
Once the art is done, it has to be sent to a modeler and texture artist so they can create, texture, and rig the models. Even after modeling, rigging, and animating, the models have to be placed and told what to do. When will the different animations take place? Are there triggers to certain events that will call on the model? Are there animation segments that are called between animations so it's smooth? All these steps make up just a small segment of the entire game development process, so you can only imagine the amount of time and effort it takes to create a full-scale triple-A game.
We've been working hard on a demo that was scheduled to take two months to build, which is a short time for a technical demo to get completed. But with extremely tight coordination, we managed to hit our goal with minor technical difficulties. Currently, everyone at Faramix works together online because we don't have a physical office yet to accommodate us all since it requires money we don't have yet. Coordinating a video game project is hard enough in one studio; doing it all online takes substantially more tender loving care.
Images used under the expressed permission from Faramix Enterprises LLC. All work copyright and trademarked 2007 by Faramix Enterprises. Do not duplicate, copy, or reproduce without prior written permission.
As of now, we have a few weeks left before having some in-person meetings with publishers. We're using this time to make small changes to improve what we've already completed -- so the work is never done. Even for a small demo, it took extremely tight coordination to finish in time. While I was writing out the designs and flow of the level, we had already started working on the music composition, menu layout, and controls. I finished the level designs in a few days and moved on to working with the environment artist to get the designs visually mapped out. We also finished concept drawings so the object and environment modelers knew the color schemes of textures and the different sizes of objects.
Within the first month of building the demo, we had the environment and objects modeled, but not yet textured, and our first official build was run through, testing the menu system and finalizing the GUI. We spent all of September texturing environments and objects, and putting the pieces of the demo together. This included placing objects, setting triggers, creating AI paths and spawns, developing the background skybox, and even lighting the scenes. Granted this is a simplified version of every detail we completed and the timeline, but it should give you a basic idea of how much there is to do.
