May 3, 2010 by Alec Holowka
One of the weirdest things about being an indie game developer is the work schedule. Have you ever worked as your own boss? What about being your own boss as well as trying to coordinate a team of other people? 
The idea of setting your own pace and being in charge of your own schedule might sound pretty good. And in many ways, it is. If you’re running your own game project, you get to choose what the priorities are, when you get up and when you go to bed, how many hours per day you should spend working on various tasks – etc.
However, by deciding to go down this path your responsibilities begin to increase exponentially. If you were working for a large company with several layers of managers, the managers would be the one keeping track of where the project is supposed to be. You’d only have to worry about your block of work; the rest of the project would be taken care of.
When you’re running your own project though, its success or failure is ultimately resting entirely on your shoulders. So it’s not as if you’re “more free” in the sense that you can just take whole days off to be lazy – in fact, your workload is going to be much larger…
Read On
Apr 19, 2010 by Alec Holowka
Last time I promised to talk about business… Oh joy!
One of the unfortunate side-effects of running your own little game development team is that you have to pay everyone. Not that that in-and-of itself is a big deal, but there is a lot of paperwork and procedure that goes along with it.
Adam Saltsman, feat. Money
In our case, we have a bit more of a headache because we’re using “government funding”.
What Funding?
The fund in question is called MIDMF… the “Manitoba Interactive Digital Media Fund”. It has three sections: prototyping, development and marketing. We’ve been in the prototype stage.
Read On!
Jan 26, 2009 by Alec Holowka
Ladies and gentlemen, behold our latest video blog:
[Vimeo 2974135]
A couple weeks ago, I was invited to go to the Manitoba legislative building to talk about new media government funding with other companies and the Minister of Technology. (and science and energy and mines) While the video blog is kinda goofy, the actual meeting was upbeat and sincere. The idea is to make it easier for new media companies to get off the ground in Winnipeg, and it seems like there are some folks in government who want to make this happen.
Unfortunately, governments contain a lot of slow-moving bureaucracy that is hard to control. Right now there are a fair number of stumbling blocks in the fund application process. We managed to help identify these issues and it seems like they will be fixed.
The meeting ended with all the involved parties feeling pretty hopeful about the future. All in all, it was a pretty fun and exciting morning.
Aug 28, 2008 by Alec Holowka
Hi everyone,
My name is Christopher Lobay and I have never made a video game before. Does this matter? Hopefully not. Why? Well, I’ve loved games as long as I’ve been conscious, and I’ve spent most of my relatively short life being a creative workaholic and making *other* things, like “a successful design firm”:http://ambientempire.com and over a dozen films.
In my spare time I ride my fixed-gear bicycle, listen to many genres of music, read books, and chase after a particularly lovely young woman. In all seriousness, I’m really just so lucky to be included in an amazing project with such wonderfully talented people.
I wanted to talk briefly about part of what I do here at Infinite Ammo: marketing. More specifically: marketing your independent games.
Regardless of the various niche opinions on the matter, in general marketing “hype” is a good thing. Simply, it gets more people playing your game. Moreso, if you’re selling your game, it makes you money, and making money lets you make more more games. And, if you’re releasing your game as freeware, it gets you noticed, and getting noticed for a job well done is really nice. In the end, everyone loves to see people buying and playing independent games, and that’s exactly what marketing helps you achieve.
