These are excellent tips. We’ve broken a few of these rules, and have kept others. i’m going to research your list of technologies – i know basecamp and mailchimp, but i haven’t heard of the rest of them.

It’s a good point that some people have gone into business with a big bag of money and haven’t burned through it all yet. This is the feeling i get about people who are VC- or Angel-financed. It’s easy to stay afloat when you’re bankrolled, but try starting from scratch. Now that i’ve come to understand what it takes to run a shop, and i see all these bizarre stores with downtown Toronto storefronts and keep wondering how they even keep the lights on, i come to understand: it’s likely Mommy or Daddy’s money. What does Joe Average audience member stand to learn from that?

i like to be transparent with how we got the money, how we spent it, and how we hope to find more. That’s a lot more useful than “Step 1: Win the lottery.”

Starting a business is brutally hard. There are just so many fun ways it can blow up in one’s face. For what it’s worth a few things that worked for me:
- keep costs low and only spend what you can afford.
- stick to small projects at first and exceed expectations.
- expect to get paid a fair wage. if you don’t charge market rate people will treat you like dirt.
- don’t be afraid to turn down a job if you don’t think you can do a great job of it.
- reduce your workload by using tools like unfuddle, basecamp, mailtrust, mailchimp, pingdom etc unless you have a damn good reason for rolling your own solution.
- try to main redundancy in expertise. do what you can to make sure more than one person has the info in their head.
- Labour is the mother of all expenses, everything else is minor in comparison so make sure you are getting your money’s worth.
- Your time is often the limiting factor. Once things are rolling start asking yourself ‘do I need to be the one doing this?’.

And sexy. Dead sexy.

Re: First-timer questions … i would have liked to have had the moderator survey the room so we knew who we were talking to. i didn’t know if it was mostly students or professionals. i didn’t know if we had mostly console-focussed folks or casual developers. First-timer questions might have been appropriate – who knows? But to put your mind at ease, it’s the mandate of the IGDA Toronto Chapter to increasingly target its discussions to working professionals in the game industry. The students can come and glean what they can, but they’re not the focus, so your beef is valid.

And i totally agree with you about making a game. He who executes, wins. i’m glad to hear you guys are so far along on your first project! Upcoming discussions will focus on exactly the types of topics you listed. i hope to run one in April about pipeline management, tools, and streamlining.

i shall call it “On the Pipe.”

- Ryan

I’d probably be happier videotaping weddings. I’d certainly be making more money.

I agree with you it would have been great to have heard more of how things failed for people. Those failures were kind of touched on at a higher level but I don’t recall many specifics being pointed out. It’s tough to have an in depth conversation because of the amount of people on the panel, in the room and the length of the conversation. Only so much can be done in an hour and a half.

I don’t know how to say this without kind of sounding like a dick but I would’ve liked to have seen less first timer type questions like “Do you think its a good idea to work on a mod?”. The answer to this came up indirectly by I think almost every member of the panel. Make something you can show to people don’t just talk about it. That is a key point I think should be really hammered home. Everyone talks about making games just get out and do it! Doesn’t matter if its good, bad or ugly. On that line of thinking have more discussion on how to properly achieve that would have been great. How do you stay motivated to achieve your goal? Tools, mentors, websites, etc.

We touched on UbiSoft a little … it was interesting to me that the room was projecting doom and gloom, but that the panel was not. All in all, a favourable forecast for Ontario’s gaming future.

The impending local Ubisoft studio may have been the invisible elephant in the room. Some in that audience might appreciate a deeper discussion of employee vs. entrepreneur career paths.