Through CWolf and Jargon you’ve caught a glimpse of the technical side of things and the development of computer games. I’m hoping to give you an idea of the other (admittedly more boring) aspects of Deadworld Studios.

So, the business side of things, getting things set up and running legally and financially.

This isn’t a business blog so I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail, instead I’m just going to skim over some of the problems we’ve had and how we’ve addressed them.

As you probably know if you’ve spoken to any of the team we’ve all had a long term interest in programming and computer games, over the years at University we’ve had many ideas and fads and even managed to fit in bits and pieces of development here and there – we’ve never really had the time or discipline to put together a completed and polished product however. With us all starting University together but finishing at different times we’ve worked and played alongside numerous different people but those of us that remain are what we consider the core group who have kept in touch and worked together even when we’ve been spread out across the UK – with us out of University and an ever growing desire to make our own games it only made sense for us to dig in together and set up shop.

First things first. We love games but that’s never been enough to get them up and running – if it was we’d have popped out hundreds during our University days; even in the early days of Deadworld Studios when we had tentative milestones and targets set we found them sliding and frequently being forgotten about.

The problem, as we’ve discovered, was a lack of reviewing – face to face reviewing. We only ever met face to face in social situations, and although we would often chat about Deadworld projects it was easy to gloss over delays or change the topic. Discussing things online was even worse, lack of emotional context in chat meant that discussions rarely got anywhere constructive.

Proper meetings were the solution; although we all have busy schedules we realised that two of us were always free on Thursday evenings so the third simply had to pick a Thursday to suit him – and thus was born our first face to face business meeting.

Preparing the agenda was relatively straight forward, although we weren’t actually planning on applying for finance for what was effectively our ‘business formation meeting’ I decided to base the meeting on the same structure as writing a business plan (with a few adjustments here and there of course). The meeting was a success in getting a proper framework in place for how we were going to work in future as well as setting numerous tasks and approaches that we needed to get in place, most importantly we started scheduling regular meetings from that point on and meeting up for business rather than social reasons made it much easier to monitor and review progress.

I’ll leave it at that for now before you all fall asleep, I’ll try to make my next blog about something a bit more interesting than business.