This week was the first week back from easter break, due to personal reasons I could not make it back for the monday lecture.

Catching up from blackboard I understand that the public showcase will be on Friday the 1st. We should have a working build of our game that is accessible through an Itch.Io page, we also need to create a poster to market our game.

On Thursday during the tech hours I focused on updating my wordpress, spellchecking etc. I also looked at the team website and ensured that all finished posts were added to the site menu.

During the afternoon lecture we had a guest over zoom that runs a consultancy for games studios, 8-bit Studios. The talk was very informative and opened my eyes to a side of the industry I had not given much thought to before.

The consultancy mostly works with indie studios so they went over things that studios should do when setting up.

• Write a founders agreement.
• Allocate responsibilities of who will manage the paperwork side of stuff.
• Do not shy away from talking about money.
• Write revenue share agreements

They went over when you should get lawyers involved in your studio.

• Involve when dealing with a company
• get lawers involved to read over publishing contracts to ensure that they align with your studios values.

The last thing they did was go over some common legal terms and what they mean.

• NDAs – Hard to impose consequences, most commonly used when under a publishing studio for the purposes of marketing.
• Internal Policies(HR) – make sure your studio has certain policies inplace at the beginning like accessibility ones, even if not immediately needed.
• Employee Rights – Maternity leave, sick days and leave.

For the rest of the lesson we had a short discussion over who should make the poster, I initially offered to do it but the environment artist had already made a fantastic start.

I then turned my attention to figuring out what I needed to do for the rest of the week. The deadline for our other module is soon so I spent the rest of the week alternating my time between finishing off my business plan and drafting keyframes for the opening cutscene.

Next Steps:

I need to work on my cutscene animation further. A team meeting also needs to be sheduled so we can build and test that the game works.