Monofrog Games: My Solo-Dev Studio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_T3zX3LA_c

Hello! Sorry for the radio silence, I've been a bit busy lately. Long story short, I started my very own game studio, Monofrog Games! Here's a video where I talk a bit about what I did to create the business in really broad strokes, but I wanted to break down one of the things that I gloss over a bit in this video, which is the business plan.

As I mentioned in the video, part of my research into creating this business was dedicated to researching business plans and how they could be applied to my ideas of an indie solo-dev studio. Now, I'm no business expert, but I wanted to push myself to understand enough to have strong foundations for my own indie studio before founding it. So, I used some business plan templates I found from my local public library, and put together a little business plan of my own.

Now, this document is less of a plan meant to be followed to the letter at all times, and more of a useful document that I can turn back to when I am trying to figure out what is next for the business. I made sure to include information about the founding of the business and why I believe I can handle it. I made sure to include the philosophies I want to carry in my day-to-day "operation" of the business. Finally, I made sure to include information regarding a production and content-release schedule. Now, let's talk about why I prioritized these three areas for my pseudo plan.

Founding of the Business & My Abilities

For this section, I wanted to help myself establish exactly what I was going to be doing with my business and more importantly how I was going to be doing it. While it was a bit awkward to be writing about myself in the third person, I felt like it was easier to express my skills and planned actions when I took myself as an individual a bit out of the equation. Identifying marketplaces, software, social media platforms, and the like helped me set my scope for the administration side of the business, much in the same way that a design document helps me set the scope of my game projects. The big commitment I made in this section was a promise to release at one product each year. I'll talk a bit more about this in the Production & Content Release section, but this essentially meant that I was giving myself a (albeit incredibly soft) deadline. Putting this down on paper immediately gave me some limitations (in a good way). I now had a rough expectation of what each product I produced would look like from beginning to end.

Philosophies of Operation

This section is fairly short in my plan, but I felt that it was essential to include. The whole crux of these two paragraphs is to convey that I am not aiming for perfection with my work. In fact, I'm relying on feedback gathered throughout the project in order to make my product the best it can be. This might sound obvious to those outside of solo-dev work, but when you are the only person working on a creative project, it can be very easy to tailor that project to the tastes of a single person- you. That isn't always bad, especially if you have good taste and an eye for what others may enjoy, but as all game-devs know, you're your worst playtester in most situations. You know everything about your work, including exactly how it was intended to be experienced. As a QA Analyst, I'm very familiar with finding exploits, cheese-strats, or just straight up functional bugs. This section was really a way for me to tell myself not to expect to get it in one. Messing up is good, because it's an opportunity to learn.

Production & Content Release

Fun thing about solo-developers, we typically don't want to release our games until they are perfect. If you're in the games-sphere, you probably know what I mean. Stardew Valley taking 10 years, Cave Story taking 6, and many others following suit. I knew when I was first researching business plans that the most important part of my plan would be this section to avoid that exact problem.

Cards on the table, I don't want to be working on a game for 10 years. I don't want to be working on a game for 6 years! I don't want to be working on a game for 2 years! Ok, maybe I could work on a game for 2 years if I was incredibly jazzed about it, but as I said in the previous section, I don't want to aim for perfection. I am still a relatively new designer, and I'm looking to learn more about how I create games that others enjoy. If I'm spending all my time on a single project, I'm not going to find that. At the same time, if I don't spend enough time on a project to polish it, I'll never really be able to show off what I can do with a larger timeline. So what do I do?

Easy! Have two projects going at once. Now, I know that most people would probably say that I'm a bit too ambitious, but hear me out. I can have two projects going at a time, one a short-scope project, and one a long-scope project. I talked about this a bit in the video, but the purpose behind this is actually to manage the quality-level of my projects as well as my own sanity. If I give myself 6 months to develop a project (which is exactly how long I gave myself to develop Specter and Empty Spiral), I can consistently release new games to the public while also learning more about design. These projects are meant to be well-made, but I don't need them to be the highest bar of quality that blows people away.

That is instead reserved for my long-scope projects, which I hope to have completed from beginning-to-end in 24 months at maximum. The goal of these projects is to make something that is actually commercially competetive. I want to put my all into these projects, getting them to a level of polish that can really compete with top-dog indie games. These are the projects that I really want Monofrog to be known for.

Running the numbers on this idea, the math says that I'll release 2.5 products a year, which seems good to me. Obviously, that comes in at 250% of what my goal of one project a year is, and that's on purpose. I know that life is going to impact me at some point or another. I know I have mental health that is prone to fluctuations, and I know I have the human tendencies to drop the ball on occassion. By planning that into my schedule, my hope is that I can always be hitting my goals, and anything extra I accomplish is bonus! It's better to consistently be far surpassing the bar than stressing about meeting it, in my opinion.

Final Thoughts

So, what will become of Monofrog Games? I'm not sure! I'm not stressing too much about it, as I'm not planning on making it my sole-focus anytime soon. I like having a stable job, and I like my passion projects being seperate from my livelihood. I see this as an opportunity to keep my design skills sharp and my production skills to boot.