Building a studio from scratch: The final week

Now that things are starting to really move, it’s about time we started to get contracts sorted out for the way that we’re working.

Although we’ve not finished anything yet, it’ll ensure we don’t hit any problems later on if we all know who’s going to be doing what, and what the rewards will be.

We contacted a great guy called Alex Chapman through our North West Indies group, and his company Sheridans Solicitors (www.sheridans.co.uk).

Sheridans have one of Europe’s leading teams of lawyers specialising in games and helping developers in particular. Their clients include lots of indie developers like Mojang, Playdead, Hello, Introversion and Hog Rocket – and bigger studios like Splash Damage, Slightly Mad Studios, Double 11 and Sumo.

They have an initiative of helping people that have come from larger games developers to start up their own ventures. They are friendly, approachable, very experienced and understand the needs of developers.

In terms of specifics they help businesses from 1 man indies through to AAA’s, deal with issues from setting up, how best the deal with IP and doing deals with publishers and platforms to growing, taking on staff and investment and ultimately selling out – so they seem like a good match for us.

So far we’ve kept spending to an absolute minimum, but incoming cash is starting to come in now with our outsourcing work.

Sudoku Logic is now finished! We are just doing the final tests over the next week and we’ll be submitting to the app stores for iOS and Android.

The tough part of this game was setting the difficulty so that it is easily accessible (how many times have you heard that?) for the mainstream and the beginners and making sure that the harder levels present a good challenge to the hardcore. To help with this we have 4 levels of difficulty Easy, medium, Hard and Expert.

We’ve also created an app which is a bit of a psyche test – I’ll tell you more in the next diary once we have submitted that to the app stores too.

The good news just keeps coming – The Pixel Bullies and the University of Derby have teamed up and created an exciting new project for their students. The students of the BA (Hons) Computer Games Modelling and Animation course will be working with The Pixel Bullies on their latest racing game project which will be released on iOS, Android and PC.

Finally, this dev diary will be moving house to The Pixel Bullies website at www.ThePixelBullies.com this will enable us to keep in touch with you a lot easier and also you’ll be able to sign up to have this delivered to your inbox so you don’t miss any of the unraveling story.

Total money spent so far: £802.63

Negatives
* Our underwater game is temporarily on hold whist Paul is away.
* We’ve just paid out for a Unity licence to get ready for our release.

Positives
* Sudoku Logic is complete and in final testing
* The outsourcing is cooking along, but we could still use a couple more environment artists.
* Spending is still at a minimum, but just gone up.
* The Psyche app is almost complete