Indie company primary research analysis
After getting some interesting answers from people in industry I decided to collect all in information in one place; so I have a list of all of the shortened answers from everyone that got back to me and then all the data collected into charts and graphs.
Joshua (Jay) Adeloye
CEO of Drop Dead Interactive
Jay is the CEO of Drop Dead Interactive
3 people work in the company
They normally have one game that is the main focus and but still work on prototypes and other ideas at the same time
The split the teams up by disciplines
They call people in the team developers if they haven't just got one set role
The company mainly outsources art and sound
They are a self funded company
Production takes on estimate 2 years
Small mobile development company
Answered by a developer at the company
Its a company of 2 people
They work remotely
They all work on the same project
They do not split up into teams
Everyone's job title is developer
Everything is worked on as a group
They do not outsource people
They are self funded
Production time on a game is 6 months
Ben Jane
Art Director/Studio Head at Penny Black Studios
Ben is the Art director and Studio head of Penny Black Studios
3 people work full time in the company
They work remotely and share an online storage space
Everyone works on finishing one game
The team is split up into Art, tech and managing
The main job roles are Art director, Technical director and Managing director
The team doesn't just have one self job each they work on multiple different things at once.
Ben works on Art, Animation and Design
Tom looks after the company and audio
Charlie works on the code and game features
The company outsources people for specific jobs, such as: 3D art, Animation, Audio design and game audio, Music composing and soundtrack, Writing and dialogue, Voice acting and voice overs.
They are funded by *A WELL KNOWN COMPANY*
How we soar [1] has been in production for 12 months
An average game takes 2 years to make
Gary Lloyd
Art director at Sigtrap Games
Gary is the Art director at Sigtrap Games
Its a company of 2
They work in an studio/office space
They split the teams up into Art, Programming and Sound
The two job roles within the company are Art director and Technical Director
They utilise game jams to develop new and interesting game concepts
They outsource people
Money for production was provided by a publisher
Their debut title was in development for 12 months
Michael (Mike) Kelly
Concept Artist at Automaton UK
Mike is a concept artist at Automaton UK
Its a company of around 15 people
They work in a shared studio space
Everyone works on the same project but as they have moved onto polishing their current game some people have started to work on another
The company doesn't have departments, they all work collaboratively
They have 1 CEO, 2 animators, 1 character artist, 1 Audio, 3 Environment, 1 concept artists and the rest are programmer/game designers
Everyone sticks to their specialisation but people help out where they can
They considered outsourcing but it was more cost effective to hire 2 new people and handle everything in-house instead
They are part funded and part self-funded
Their game Deceit [2] has been in production for 1 year now and they are working on polishing to do a hard release of the game
Small sandbox game company
Answered by the art director at the company
The team was initially just 3 people
The company now employees 13 people full-time
They work in a studio/office space
2 Artists, 1 Art Director 5 Coders, 2 designers, 2 community managers / publicity, 1 producer
They all have specific job roles
The game is in constant development and is now funded by its sales on steam
It was initially funded by the game creator, then though a kick-starter and now though steam sales
The game has been in production for 3 years now
All of the information I got back from people was relevant and interesting it is just hard to see the differences and/or similarities between them with it being text based; therefore I decided to make some graphs, charts and diagrams of the quantitative data.
Here you can see the team sizes of the different companies I got information from.
Here's a pie graph showing how long people think a game is in production for.
This one shows how many people outsource work in their companies.
This shows the different ways the companies are funded.
This pie graph shows how many people work remotely or in a office/studio space.
This whether or not the companies work on one game at a time or not.
This shows all the different employees at Automaton UK and how many of those employees are either art (red), tech (blue) or other (yellow/orange).
This shows all the different employees at a small sandbox game company and how many of those employees are either art (red), tech (blue) or other (yellow/orange).
What do these diagrams show? (what did I learn from the questionnaire answers)
Overall all the graphs and charts show that there is no set indie company or standard indie company; no companies work in the same way as another. Therefore there is not 'road map' per se for me to follow. All the information I have gathered will help myself and James decide what would be the best way to run our company, for example "should we outsource people?" the answer would be yes as long as it is the most cost effective, this is taken from the Mike Kelly's answers and from the graph on how many people outsource.
The two pie graphs on the number of employees shows how myself and James will split up our team. So there will be 50/50 Art and Tech (me=Art James=Tech) and for the 'other' section we will split it between us. Having looked at several companies that have this same ratio confirms that it will be possible for me and James to be a successful company even though there is just two of us.
Looking at the diagrams of companies workflows/pipelines are also very important; I will be looking more in depth at these soon and applying a little more logic to them.
Bibliography:
[1] PENNY BLACK STUDIOS (2016) How We Soar. [Online] PlayStation VR.
[2] AUTOMATON (2016) Deceit. [Online] Microsoft Windows. Cambridge: Automaton