Diaries from Alacrity Falmouth: Getting started

For all of us here on Alacrity, the first weeks of the program were a very exciting time. We met the people who’d become our friends and colleagues in the coming months, created some truly epic sandcastles and were soon settling into our new space in the AIR building.

The weather outside was gorgeous but with just a year to start up sustainable businesses, the real work of planning the coming year’s projects had to start straight away. Before long, each group was tackling some tough choices, faced with an array of potential partners hoping to collaborate with us and offering a variety of challenges and opportunities. We had only just come together as teams, and were already taking responsibility for our future success.

Our own team of 3D artists and programmers had the skillset to take on a real games production, and we ended up taking the risky choice to develop our own IP for consoles.

It was a decision with big consequences: we had the chance to get truly creative, but would have to quickly develop the discipline and professionalism to get our game to a polished investible state within the year.

Looking back across the last few months, the journey has been an incredible one. As a team, we’ve got used to iterating on our title and being ruthless when things aren’t working. At the same time, our planning process has evolved to a state where we can estimate the scope of our work with confidence and make smarter decisions. We’re able to get ambitious with our ideas and concepts while respecting the constraints (and freedoms!) of being a small team.

This kind of learning comes with the incubation environment here at Alacrity. It’s one thing to read about good practice in industry, but so much more valuable to go through the process yourself. It’s always valuable to present our discoveries as part of the MA course, linking our team’s development back to business theory.

The industry experience of our coaches and technicians has been vital in our growth as a team. We’ve also benefited from some great external teaching and from the start of the program through to our current sprints, we’ve worked closely with Agile coach Harvey Wheaton on our planning. Later on, our team got some focussed mentoring with Ella Romanos, whose experience running a small studio was invaluable to us.

Right now, our team’s working full-tilt on our prototype, and we’re about to see if that big initial risk has paid off! I’m super confident in the latest iteration of our game, but whatever the future has in store it’s been amazing to learn this much about games development and entrepreneurship over the months so far.

You can find out more at falmouth.ac.uk/alacrity-falmouth. You can read more Diaries From Alacrity Falmouth here.