Just read your last post. You may also want to know that I went into business with a friend, but it didn't work out for reasons I can't go into. In order for the company to do well enough to at least put food on my table, I had to lose a good friend.

He was undecided too for a while before we started, so I should have seen it coming. You need to have a stupid, almost dangerous-to-yourself amount of commitment for the company to succeed.

And as I said before, people aren't just going to offer you game contracts if you've just graduated. You'll have to take other work to build up your reputation to be able to do that stuff.

To be honest, if you're not in it to do your own stuff ...then just get a job.


EDIT: oh yeah, and you'll need to sort your internet out. And a good phone contract. You're going to be spending a lot of time dealing with people.

Thanks, I am hoping to do my own stuff eventually, but I'm willing to wait until the company is viable first. The plan is basically to do what you did, build a rep with freelance work first and take anything that people will give us/me. It does look like the others might drop out so thats probably not an issue. As to the phone and internet, the incubation scheme provides offices that have both, but I need to present my business plan to get on to the scheme. Cheers - Tim

> build a rep with freelance work first and take
> anything that people will give us/me.

What do you specialize in?

-cb

Tim, just want to make sure you understand that you are doing this ass backwards and that as a result it will be more difficult and you will be a lot poorer for longer.

Companies hire contractors for two reasons
1. They have proven skills and experience that the company needs and is willing to pay for.
2. They are cheap due to lack of experience.

As a graduate you fall into the second category and as AN_D_K points out you will be lucky to get any game contracts and those you do get will be lower paid and lower quality. You will be competing against industry experienced contractors who have all of your dedication, plus experience, contacts and skills you haven't had time to develop yet.

i. It's much harder to build a reputation by doing lower quality projects, which means you will be stuck doing them for longer.
ii. That means you earn less for longer, making it more difficult to get into a position where you can do your own thing.
iii. Due to lack of experience you will have a harder time securing work and that in turn means more time spent trying to find work (during which you won't be paid) thus adding to the problems listed in ii.
iv. The best way to secure work is via industry contacts. As a graduate you won't have those. More importantly you will have a harder time making them because you will be busy chasing work, you will be earning less so less able to afford to travel to/attend industry events to meet people and as you will be working at the lower end of the market the people you do meet will also be in the same market - not good for moving up.
iv. As a Freelancer you won't have anyone to learn from (clients won't invest their time/money in teaching you) so learning and improving will take longer.

Getting a job as an entry level coder at a decent studio will allow you to learn from experienced colleagues, get experience working on decent games (which look good on your CV), make contacts with people who will be of more help in the future and, while receiving a salary, invest some of your own time learning about the industry/business so that you will be more successful when you head out on your own.

Would you say that the benefits of getting an enty level coding job first outwiegh the loss of support from the University's business incubation programme? There are two reeasons that I am trying to do this now rather than in a few years. The second is that if I work in the industry for a few years, I will end up with financial commitments that I don't have now. That will give me a lot more to lose if things go bad. Also, is it possible to succeed the way I am planning to do things? If I try this for a year and fail, will it be harder to get an industry job than it is now? The biggest danger I see is that my company won't fail, but won't succeed either and I'll be trapped in a kind of limbo when I could have succeeded more easily the way you suggest. On the other hand, the University has had a few people set-up the way I am planing, and from what I can tell, they did pretty well.

I know what you mean. If you don’t do this now and get a proper job you may enjoy the cushy life, the money, the lifestyle, etc and never go back to having your own company. To be honest, that’s not such a bad position to be in. If you really want to run your own company then you will no matter how cushy life already is.

Ideally, you should go to a larger development company just for the training. University just doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, there is stuff you will only pick up on if you’re working with people more experienced that you. I bet you’ll learn a million things about debugging properly in your first few weeks. You’ll also learn how to deal with people on your team, get your work to work with their work, learn how to work with the company tools (I didn’t know half of these tools would exist) and use the SDKs properly.


I was in a similar incubation scheme and saw a few successes. They took on the small crappy jobs no one else wanted, worked their way up and after a few years got a few decent contracts. The other companies failed or never took off at all.

However, these companies had to deal with things like overtime, low paid staff (less than minimum wage), uninteresting, crap initial contracts (if they even got one) and a complete lack of funds to even survive on themselves. You have to keep costs down so a lot of them were still living with or taking handouts from parents, or just living on the breadline like I was. Some were still getting the dole (dodgy) or working part of full-time jobs to get by.

They have to deal with clients looking to screw them over by piling on the work, paying half of what it would take to fund their own staff, delaying payments as long as possible …and then not paying at all for the final milestones because odds are you’ve either gone bust, you can’t afford legal costs or you won’t want to do business with them again anyway.

These aren’t just the chancers getting cheap labour on the initial contracts, which your incubation scheme will have contacts to a lot of, but these are also some established companies looking to make a quick buck at your expense. I can’t really talk about it but I don’t trust incubation schemes like this anymore after having been in one.

You have to deal with the other companies that are similar to yours. You have to be friendly to keep the local hub going and to pass around work or work for each other, but knives go into backs really fast and friends become enemies before you even know it.


It can be a bloody nightmare. There are three things you can do now depending on how good your portfolio is: -

If you can get an entry-level job then get it. I’ve seen your final project stuff in another topic so presuming you have other pieces of that quality you can show off I think you have a chance. Polish that stuff off and practice your interviewing skills.

Or, there is nothing stopping you looking for work using this scheme either at these start-up companies or using the scheme to get contacts to get work. You’ll still have to undergo the indignity of low-pay (or none occasionally if they have no funds) and long hours. But hey, it gets experience on your CV and you get paid a little to build up your portfolio.

And finally, you can go off and build up your company. Running a company is a full-time job… finding work, building contacts, business plans, cash-flow, taxes, dealing with clients, running projects, dealing with financial and legal issues (with trained professionals that you pay for), more dealing with clients, etc. The companies that do well tend to have someone that deals with all that while the others do the actual ‘work’.

I went with option 3, when I should have gone with option 2. My uni stuff was rubbish because I found the work there to be boring as it was too …academic! I wasn’t going to get an entry-level job so I went through just over a year of this hell to build up my CV and portfolio.

I went with option 3 because it can be great fun if you’ve got the knack for it. I definitely got a taste for business and I yearn sometimes to go back to it. It’s a bit more exciting than getting your paycheque every month…but in the end I had to get a proper job. I was on my own so I couldn’t run the business and do the work, I wanted the proper training you can only get at a proper games company and I started to get sick of being poor all the time because of one too many missing paycheques.

OK, thanks for helping me understand all the issues better guys. At the end of the day this is something its going to take me a lot of thought to decide. I am leaning towards getting an entry level position if I can, but I have one last question if you don't mind:

If I do get an entry level position and want to work on my own stuff in my spare time, am I right in thinking that the company I work for will most likely own the rights to my projects?

Thanks again for all the help - Tim

Make sure you discuss it with HR. Where I work(in the US so maybe very different) at least whatever you do on your own time is your own business as long as you don't compete with or do business with the company.(basically a no conflicting interests line) If you want to make games on the side as long as your not selling them it should be ok.

Quote: Original post by stonemetal
Make sure you discuss it with HR. Where I work(in the US so maybe very different) at least whatever you do on your own time is your own business as long as you don't compete with or do business with the company.(basically a no conflicting interests line) If you want to make games on the side as long as your not selling them it should be ok.

Same in this little country. Although the rights to your directly competing product will not transfer to them, there will be a fine specified in your contract. Furthermore, everything created using company equipment (say a laptop) will be owned by your employer.

Quote: Original post by Tim Ingham-Dempster
Would you say that the benefits of getting an enty level coding job first outwiegh the loss of support from the University's business incubation programme?

Given your situation I would say go with the entry level job but that is a qualified answer as I don't know how good you are or how good the support is at your uni/incubator.

I have some experience with university incubators as I act as a mentor for game dev start-ups based at another UK university. The companies range from one guy (who wants to do the next Grand Theft Auto) through a couple of guys who "just want to make games" all the way up to small teams who have managed to secure commercial contracts with other developers/publishers. Via the mentor system (and the industry experienced guy who runs the incubator) they have access to industry contacts, useful info and cheap office space. Despite this only a couple have secured contracts mainly because most of them either don't have the skill, don't have the ability to run a business or else their team is just too small.

As a one man band without a proven skill set you won't be able to secure any meaningful game contracts. You might be able to work on a contract basis for one of the other teams there, but that depends on there being successful teams already within the incubator. If there aren't then getting a job is going to be the best way to learn the skills you need.

Quote: Original post by Tim Ingham-Dempster
If I do get an entry level position and want to work on my own stuff in my spare time, am I right in thinking that the company I work for will most likely own the rights to my projects?

Most companies have a non-compete/we own your IP clause in their contract. With bigger firms like EA it will be hard to get around this but many smaller/medium companies will negotiate this out or will agree that you can do your own stuff, provided that it doesn't directly compete. A team working on a console racing game probably won't mind you doing casual games in your spare time, but a casual/mobile developer would see it as competition and not allow it. Talk to the HR person before you sign the contract.