The Studio - Indie Grind

The Studio is a minimalist, 2D, Text based strategy simulation about building games. What does it take to design, build, collate, publish and distribute a game. By a small team with two to four resources that just opened doors for business. It is an underdog story.

When we started thinking about building the Studio, we wanted the game to reflect our own journey. What did it take for us to take a step on the wild side and bet everything on building the game? Where did we get stuck the most? The questions that led to the wildest and longest debates? The wall we could never breach?

Raise capital, hire resources, do market research, pick a genre, a market segment, a target language, make design decisions, pick the right playtest and launch model and the let the simulation run. Look at how well or not well you did, tweak your resource mix to eck out higher productivity with the team you picked.

The core game loop is trying to get to the finish line without getting killed in the process as a business. Rather than bullets,arrows or axes, its running out of runway that gets everyone at the end. 

The game forces you to make choices at each stage. Capital and turns are finite. They run out. The challenge is to build and ship a game that generate enough revenue to break even at the end of your quest. Each attempt is scored so you get a sense of how far off from the finishing line you were. The objective it to not just reach the finish line, but to cross it in style. 

A game is not about downloads or playtime, rankings, sales or technology. It is more than resolution, levels, frameworks, tools and technology. Like everything else we value, cherish and appreciate, games are about meaning. Sometimes about seeking meaning; sometimes about redefining it.  How do you convert a click, or a set of pixels into a portal to a different dimension of imagination. How do you link that click to the higher purpose of finding meaning? What happens when you do that?

Can one feel all that with a game driven by just numbers? Hyper realistic numbers, but still numbers at the end? That is the challenge we were trying to solve?

You decide if we managed to solve it or failed miserably.