{"id":30,"date":"2007-09-23T08:06:28","date_gmt":"2007-09-23T06:06:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/2007\/09\/23\/the-art-of-game-studio-maintenance\/"},"modified":"2020-01-02T20:25:34","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T20:25:34","slug":"the-art-of-game-studio-maintenance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/2007\/09\/23\/the-art-of-game-studio-maintenance\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Game Studio Maintenance"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the post where I tell you more about the game studio we’re starting. There’s much I still don’t know about the project, but I can at least discuss the things that are important to me<\/em> about it. The whole project is still to coalesce in terms of actual people having concrete roles in a specific game project (although it seems pretty probable that we’ll be doing Theomachy<\/em> in some form, what with me doing actual write-ups and outlines about it and all), but we’re getting there. Meanwhile, I’ve been putting down some principles that I want to emphasize, and having a little bit of design done for the project’s imago. I even have a logo…<\/p>\n

\"Studio<\/p>\n

So, let’s begin with my exact relationship to this game project Jarkko Vuori is putting together: you probably know how people act and think differently depending on their commitment to ideas and where they are situated in social webs, right? Well, my position in this project’s social web at this point is in the margins, I think. The only person I communicate with to any great extent is Jarkko Vuori, who chooses the other people for the project. The project does have a forum where everybody can get to know each other, but we haven’t got anything clear accomplished in that regard yet. The thing is, after following the social development of the project for a while, it seems to me that I’m not the only guy on the fringe: there doesn’t seem to be any kind of a motivated, visionary core to this project at all, it’s just a bunch of people interested in game development at this point. I missed the first face-to-face meeting of the project (it overlapped with my apartment convention) so I don’t know for sure if this is the case, but if Jarkko actually has a core of people around him who know what they’re doing and whose leadership I should look for, they’re certainly being very low-profile about it.<\/p>\n

This kind of pondering is important in social group situations simply so that we don’t step on each other’s toes when doing stuff. I’m not yet sure if I should be looking at this project as something that’s been in existence before my involvement and where I should be looking to others for guidance, or if I should be that guidance myself. On the one hand Jarkko obviously has this bunch of young programmers (students, according to their autobiographies on the forum) he knows and has invited into the project around the same time or perhaps before asking me into this. On the other hand, the discussion seems pretty intermittent and incoherent, kinda like if everyone’s just gotten together and trying to figure out what we’re here for.<\/p>\n

One thing in this current social murk is luckily pretty clear, and it’s that Jarkko Vuori is the producer of the project. “Producer” – stripped of ulterior meanings – being the guy who knows everybody else, assigns tasks and crafts the crew into a team. I have no idea yet if he’ll take the right steps to make this happen, but it’s not my place to worry about it either way. My own position, according to our one-on-one discussion, seems to be pretty solidly as the main designer guy, including art direction and other content creation, at least until we get more solid talent on that side of things. The social murk makes me uncertain about whether the rest of the crew agrees, but I hope it won’t be too much of a problem. I’ll just have to write solid game design, and hopefully we get the others interested and inspired to commit to the project.<\/p>\n

Anyway, one concrete result from us not having a very clear overall plan is that I ended up designing a draft for the publicity strategy of our group. This was mainly because we’ll ultimately need some kind of name for the company, but I also took the opportunity to wax pedantic about the values<\/em> we want to promote with our work. In my head values, publicity and content design are pretty closely tied: you want to be truthful about what you represent, you want to communicate your representation in your design of publicity materials, and so on. Consequently I tapped my brother Jari to design the above logo and wrote down a ream of text about what I<\/em> think our company should be about. Here are the main points:<\/p>\n