Note: GmbH is roughly speaking the German equivalent to an LLC, everything is just more complicated over here.

As mentioned in yesterday's prerelease post, I am becoming an evil company. In this post I want to elaborate a bit more on that and then proceed to the more interesting part, as to how I forsee that to help us improve the games. You can think of it as a roadmap post that doesn't focus on a game project, but rather on the business development project.

1 The Spider in the Web

Technically, I already was a business before - I sold games, earned money, paid taxes on the income and so one - but my structure was sole trader + freelancers and there was no real difference between me and the company, which is especially important for earnings (and also liability, but that's a less important subject in gamedev), which become subject to my personal taxes (Roughly 48%). On the other hand, as a corporation, it is a legal entity on its own, and if I leave money in the company, I pay a fixed tax rate of roughly 30%. This makes it a lot easier to transfer funds into future years (especially from big income boosts such as game releases), which in return is important for the actually important thing that impacts us, which is hiring employees and ensuring that I have a war chest to build up their salaries in case of unexpected income drops.

So, the short of it is, the main advantage is that hiring becomes easier which allows us to go into the next step of business development: Moving away from the sole trader + freelancers model to a studio based approach of core team + freelancers.

And that brings me to the main topic I want to talk about in this post. Right now, everything that we have built up here has one big, fatal weakness: Me.

I am a spider at the center of a web.

If I get sick or on vacation, we get a single of failure that can significantly slow down production. I have organized most of it so that our freelancers can just keep working on their briefs, but ultimately, I'm the only one who can properly do the full loop of commission -> review -> integration. There is an exception with Trihan who can work together with our assistant writer Absurdity directly but otherwise, it pretty much all goes to me.

And that is also currently the reason why I hadn't updated our funding goals. Supervising the current amount of freelancers while maintaining enough time to perform my own work, has pretty much max out my capacities.

We could for example perfectly go to our UI artist and commission a special negotiation menu from them for Liora. We have the money, we have the talent - except they have no idea about Liora, negotiations, and so on, so preparing the necessary material, doing the discussions, iterating and reviewing their proposals, etc. takes too much time on my end. Especially if we consider that it night need to be updated if I add new functionality to negotiations.

2 Transition to an Indie Studio

And this brings us back to the topic of full-time hires vs freelancers. The biggest advantage of moving to a studio structure with full-time employees that I am hoping to gain is that our core members will have a lot more knowledge about the game, giving them the ability to peforms freelancer interaction instead of me, thus freeing up my management capacities.

Below is the team that I kind of want to work towards to in the future

We already have our first candidate with Trihan and also the funding to hire him as soon as the last steps of the GmbH founding are done + he has done some communication with the british tax office on what's necessary on his side to work overseas for me.

The next position I would like to make a priority is bringing an artist into the core team. Now, artist can mean a lot of things. Would they draw H-CGs, for example? I was thinking more about a general artist who can bring an artistic view into the core team that both I and Trihan lack. Their main job I would see more in pixel art and UI design to improve the game's visual quality, rather than pushing quantity.

If we look at NSFW games and SFW games, I think there is always quite a big difference in exactly this deparment - which makes perfect sense! As an NSFW game, we need to spend a lot of resources on H-CG production, the "frame" kind of comes second. But I think we have reached a point, where investing in the visuals around the H-CGs produces more value to the game than focusing everything into H-CG production. It would also help me alot by giving me more design freedom by being less constricted to my pool of assets from asset packs. Speaking of asset packs, should we ever want to move away from that and develop our own "pixel game identity" then this would also be a necessary step.

Of course, in an ideal world this lead artist would be an egg-laying-wool-milk-pig who can do pixel art, draw H-CGs, make trailers, make H-animations, design UI and create marketing content :D, but it's doubtful we would find someone who could do all that, so we will need to make due with whatever combination they end up having.

I don't have a candidate yet, and we anyways haven't quite reached the necessary funding as of now, but based on my current calculations, I believe at 17500€, I could hire a full time game artist in Germany into our core team.

The third position would temporarily be filled by Trihan. Based on my work on SKA and Liora, the last super high value core member, would be someone focusing on side-content production for more scenes, quests, reactivity, etc.. If we had this team funded at the start of Liora, I would have probably have this person work on a Rean and/or Edgar perspective mode. Now that would be too late but that's just an example fo the kind of content a full time secondary content developer could provide.

I believe this would cover most of our bases and if were to grow further, we could scale up the freelancers (but that is very much future music).

3 The Dangers of Growth

I want to make one more note to conclude on this topic: While is this how I personally see us grow in the future, it's not something that needs to happen. Currently, we have everything we need to make games at the current level of quality and the current pace. If we want to increase/improve, we of course need to grow and this would be how I would go about it. But honestly, we were to just stick around at our current earning levels to produce games as they are right now, I don't think that would be a big issue either.

Growing always also comes with risks. The more money we spend, the more people we need to reach in order to make that money back again. I think a lof of other game studios then end up in a bad spiral, where they need to make their games more generic to increase the audience size, to afford their development teams, which then eventually costs their games their core identities and loses them their original fans.

I believe that with the plan that I have in mind, we should be able to increase our reach without compromising on the identity of the games I make and that shouldn't happen, but I just to point out here that growing slowly from here on out and avoiding such pitfalls is also an advantage.

And I think that covers about everything I wanted to talk about. I hope I could give you some insight on the current state of the business development side and where future money would go to.