Posts tagged with “competition”

As you probably already know, we make games. Specifically, we’re busting our ass making one game which we’re hoping to have out next year on XBLA, PSN, WiiWare, PC, or some combination thereof. That means we’re going to enter our game into the IGF and SMU/Guildhall competitions.

But both submission deadlines are only two weeks away (Halloween!), and we’ve still got a lot to do before we’re ready to submit! So we’ve entered crunch, that semi-hellish, always delirious period where we eat, sleep, and live in the office in an attempt to get everything squared away on time. It’s kind of annoying that we even need to do such a thing, but I suppose that the most successful endeavors always come with a lot of hard work.

Specifically, we’re cleaning up a lot of our animations, making our characters and menus look extra shiny, squashing bugs, and trying to create an awesome set of videos, trailers, and wallpapers for all of you who are eagerly anticipating finding out what the hell we’re up to. Keep checking in here over the next few weeks and we’ll finally announce our game! Also, if you live in the area and want to stop by our office with a care package of food, booze, or caffeine, it would be greatly appreciated

On Thursday I wound up spending the majority of the day at two business events – the MassTLC new technologies “unconference” and a panel at MIT on different ways to fundraise and bootstrap in a tough economy. Here’s a quick summary of the interesting things that were discussed!

MassTLC new technology “unconference”

This meeting was a gathering of entrepreneurs, business people, angels/venture capitalists, and just about anyone involved in creating and bringing new technologies to market. I went to a talk on how to raise money from angel investors which went over basic but useful information (know what you’re asking for, get an introduction, have a good story, have experience, find a champion for your cause at the angel group, and give it plenty of time because it’ll take 6 months). Afterwards I attended a talk on standing out from the crowd and capitalizing on your competitive advantages, and I basically got the impression that we need to stand up on our soapbox more and put together a more compelling story for people who want to learn about us. The most fun part of the day, though, was meeting with other entrepreneurs and angels. It’s interesting how different the video game market (and most media markets) are different from other tech ventures – whereas in other ventures you need to show how you’re better than the competition since the customer will only buy one product, in the games market you need to be “good enough” since most consumers will buy from multiple competitors. Really cool stuff!

MIT VMS panel on fundraising/bootstrapping in touch economic times

This panel was a lot of fun since I was speaking on it. I’ll save you the boring bits I spoke about and tell you about some of the cool stories the other guys on the panel told. Ryan Damico from Webnotes spoke about how he got his family and friends to buy into his company by giving them convertible notes, and how they’ve been racing to get customers for their still nascent application. Waseem Daher from Ksplice managed to raise a lot of money through various competitions like the MIT 100K (he won) and even got a European scholarship for development of a Linux version of his product. He ended up moving in to an apartment with his other 3 co-founders to save capital, and by being extremely thrifty they’re going to be able to go to market without investor funding. Awesome! Finally Bryan Schmid of Atlas Devices spoke about getting government contracts and how manufacturing physical hardware changes the game, and what you need to watch out for. All of us then fielded questions for about an hour covering a huge range of start up questions, all the way from how much stock to give advisors and employees to how to hire good employees to how to raise money from your family.

Ok, so not super video-gamey, but I think this stuff is neat to learn about. Don’t worry, next week we can get back to talking about how much Final Fantasy XIII is gonna suck.

Last weekend I took part in the Heavy Metal: Amped on Wind Power challenge at the Boston Museum of Science. It’s an incredible one day engineering challenge in which high schoolers from all across the US meet up, are randomly broken into teams, and have to rapidly design, prototype, test, and build a huge mechanical structure to lift a giant metal trash can three stories into the air using nothing but wind power. The competition was a ton of fun, and I was assigned as a mentor to Team Steel, the most hard core group at the event. As such I gave them guidance and advice for what to do, but the team actually came up with and implemented the awesome device you see above. And it’s a good thing too, since they had much better ideas than I would have ever had.

We had few materials (mostly cardboard, duct tape, and pvc piping), and our only power source were two giant fans blowing hurricane gusts. After a lot of discussion and failed designs the team settled on the waterwheel device you see above. The cups on the bottom would catch the wind, spinning the whole device around an axle made out of two cardboard tubes coated with torn up trash bags to decrease friction. As it spun it would wind up a rope which was attached to the trash can through a pulley, hoisting it to the ceiling.

So how’d we do? Pretty damn well! We raised the trash can the full 27.6 feet in only 83 seconds earning us 5th place out of 32 teams. Only 11 teams raised the can the entire distance, so it was quite an accomplishment (the winning team shattered the previous record, finishing in 29 seconds. Wow!). The most impressive part in my mind though was how the team iterated on design after testing, and how quickly they settled on an idea to try instead of debating endlessly. Hopefully some of these super talented kids will wind up getting interested in game development!