Tales from the road less travelled
Designing a games production company that can generate revenue via open source has been challenging. I’ve come across companies in my research that generate revenue from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) through other Intellectual Property such as artwork and franchising options. One of my steering principles is to ensure as much as possible about the company is transparent and open, the projects and business processes themselves will be part of the studio’s Git repositories and rely only on FOSS. Ideally, the company itself will be fully git driven — i.e. pull requests to change company policy and discuss new project ideas.
After over seven years of working on games development in my spare time, it became pretty clear that the time and resources I could commit in my spare time were just not going to produce the games I wanted with the technology at my disposal. Using git-time, I was able to get some estimates for how much time I’ve spent based on the git commits in key repositories so far. They’re not exactly accurate but it’s clear that my hobby is pretty time consuming and that trying to scale it by throwing more of my free time at them is not sustainable.
- Langenium — 322 hours
- Kamigen — 46 hours
- Kettlefish — 16 hours
- Manifold — 56 hours
My new plans for Kamigen, Kettlefish and Manifold will require 1,162 hours or approximately 9 months to complete (if I can find a way to commit 30 hours a week). That effort’s only to get the projects into states that will elevate them for the next phase of fundraising and marketing. I’m happy with this plan though, I have to admit that until setting out to start this company I hadn’t even developed a full plan to produce anything with my projects. I now have an idea of how much they’re worth as assets (it’s not bad) if I were to sell my ownership of them.
The mindset of innovation and finding revenue sources to fund my R&D work has started to have an impact on my thinking. I’ve been using Xero to generate invoices and was about to switch to a Word template when I had the idea to use Kettlefish instead.
Kettlefish started out as a simple boilerplate for me to generate static HTML websites, it’s now at the center of all my web presences with improvements being fed back from my projects. Since getting the new functionality for my invoicing needs done, I’ve published it to NPM and expanded it’s scope as a CLI tool. Kettlefish can now generate HTML for non website purposes such as publishing, documentation and invoicing.
The next steps in planning my studio will be defining a vision for the projects through 2025 and putting some serious thought and research into the money side of things.
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