This past weekend @IToTheG celebrated its 12th birthday. Yay! Twelve years helping our partners make their games, and occasionally making our own. We learned a lot over time, and in this thread, I’d like to share some of what we learned along the way.

Over the next week or so I’ll be replying to this thread, adding a year of learnings each time. Hopefully this is useful to someone out there.

Year 1, Two big takeaways from this period: Payroll is scary af and building a company from nothing is fun! For the first six months it was just me, but over the last half of the year I managed to get some of my old team from Midway to join me on this adventure.

Shoutouts to @proguerammer for being the first to take the plunge. If he didn’t get the dominos tipping over, it’s entirely possible I’m not here right now typing out this story. Thanks, Mike! But yeah, back to the main point.

At the end of year 1 the cost of running the company was about 100k/month. As someone who comes from an engineering background, with little to know business experience, the thought of having to come up with 100k/month was absolutely numbing.

It was really hard for me not to obsess about the company going out of business. This was due to some imaginary problems, and one actual Large Problem. Wrt the Large Problem, I will get to that in Year two, because that’s when I actually realized what it was.

Our only client at this point was Capcom, and the main reason for that was @amboyes. Adam and I worked together at Midway, and went through a lot together there. Our first project was helping get the PS3 version of Dark Void out the door.

We worked our assess off trying to make that happen. This was not the “no-crunch” Iron Galaxy that we have become today. This was 7 people trying to get something started in the midst of a once-in-a-generation (lol) recession.

In this environment, it was impossible for a new business to get a loan from a bank, same for a line of credit. It’s pretty common for new businesses to be built on some sort of financing. This wasn’t an option for us. We needed cashflow.

Wrt cashflow, the nagging voice in my head, the same one that told me I should be doing my homework in school instead of playing 4th and Inches, was telling me “YOU’RE DOING THIS WRONG,” but I wasn’t ready to hear that. I kept programming 24/7.

We worked exclusively on Dark Void for the duration of our first year in business, but we all were having fun despite the difficulties of working from home , traveling to Redmond a lot to be with the main dev on the game, and building a business.

This concludes Year 1. Year 2 to come tomorrow.

Year 2, the theme of this year is Scared Straight. We were working exclusively for Capcom at the beginning of year 2. We had wrapped up our work on Dark Void, and rolled onto the next project, codename: Dr. Ritz.

Dr. Ritz was a RTS game being developed by Gas Powered Games for Capcom. GPG had a PC and XB version in the works, but Capcom wanted us to do a PS3 version. This was a big break for us, as being the primary devs on the PS3 was a big responsibility.

GPG was great to work with. @DeathBot9 and his team accepted us with open arms, and we got off to a great start on that project. Within a few months the PS3 had caught up to the XB version in most ways, and the team was rocking and rolling.

Then in December, right before holiday break, I received a phone call. Capcom was cancelling the game. They were happy with our work, but for whatever reason they were cancelling all versions of the title. It was in this moment I realized how bad I was at my job.

I didn’t have any leads for the next thing, I didn’t *really* have any established contacts at other publishers, and Capcom didn’t have anything else for us to work on at that time. We had enough money for two months and no income at that point.

I had been at a handful of companies that either gone out of business or faced massive reductions in headcount. One of the benefits of this, was that I had friends at most game companies in North America. Over the next few days I contacted all of them.

Through this network, we got *extremely* lucky. A friend at Turbine was able to get our foot in the door there, and we helped them with some tool and rendering support. At the same time @MikeBilder got his deal done to make You Don’t Know Jack! deal done with THQ.

I knew Mike very well. He was my boss for several years at Midway. He left Midway the same week (day?) I did to work at Jackbox Games (now @Jellyvision). Mike had been working on that deal for over a year. It’s just dumb luck he got it done right as we needed work.

We signed up to help Turbine and Jellyvision, and during this period I did a lot of self-reflection. I wasn’t living up to my obligations to everyone at the company. I was doing the work I was comfortable doing (programming), not the work that needed to be done (biz dev).

So I dove into learning how to do biz dev. In this regard @amboyes was a huge help. I didn’t even know how to meet the right people, let along build a business relationship with strangers. Adam took me under his wing, took me to shows, and taught me his ways.

He also introduced me to several agencies. If you’re unfamiliar what an agency is in this context, you’re not alone, because I didn’t have any idea at the time either. Essentially an agency represents you in your business endeavors to potential partners.

Agents have spent years building up a network of professional relationships and will leverage said relationships to get you the best deal possible (for a fee of course). I was so far behind the curve on biz dev, Adam eventually convinced me to sign with an agency.

We signed with Flashman, and it’s probably the single-best decision we’ve made as a company. There I got to learn from Brad, @haywardknight, @Angreal99, Ike, and James. At this point I was still programming mostly, but slowly I weened off that habit.

Realizations are strange. They don’t instantly transform you as a person. You still need to put the work in. I understood every moment I spent programming was bad for the company, no matter how good a programmer I was. But I’d still find myself programming from time to time.

Converting that knowledge into real life-change took years, but I’m glad I did the work to eventually get to the point where I no longer needed to program to have self-worth. Learning to get good at biz dev is what I needed to do. So I did that. That was Year Two.

Year 3 coming soon (tm)

Year 3 was all about building momentum. I was still programming (not nearly as much) but was mostly focused on learning how to build a healthy business. It was around this time I started to think about why I was doing what I was doing. Why did I start IG?

It’s odd that I never *really* thought about the “why” before. I started IG because I could, not because I had some plan. Midway was in dire straits, and while I’m sure I could have stayed around and contributed to the MK team in some form, that didn’t motivate me.

I remember talking to my wife and saying, okay things at Midway are murky at best, and I’m pretty sure I could do consulting for devs and see how that goes. I convinced her to let me try it for a few months. Worst case I would get a new job somewhere else and we’d have to move

Now it’s clear I started IG because I could, not because I had some grand vision. But when I stepped back and looked at the criteria I was using to make decisions, a few things became obvious. My primary concern was ensuring that me and my friends had a roof over our heads.

There wasn’t some game in my head that needed to get out. There wasn’t some award I was wanting to win. I wasn’t trying to prove anything to anybody. I just wanted to work with my friends for as long as possible. IG had become the vehicle by which I could do that.

Finally understanding that was pretty powerful. It allowed us to laser focus on what’s important. It gave us very clear criteria by which to vet every decision we made. We finally found our voice in Year 3. It’s no coincidence this is the same year we hired @JesusHotWheels

When Chelsea started, I was still running production on all the projects. I wasn’t ready to let go, but I knew I’d need help eventually, so, somewhat reluctantly, we hired our first producer. I remember telling Chelsea that I doubt there was 20 hours of work a week for her to do.

Suffice to say, that was maybe one of the dumbest things I’ve ever told anyone. I am not quick to make changes, and I’m not quick to trust people, but it was clear to me early on that Chelsea could handle anything I threw at her. This gave me the ability to focus on biz dev.

It would be revealed to me a few years later how hard this arrangement was for Chels, but we’ll get to that in due time.

We shipped two big projects this Year 3: SFIII, and You Don’t Know Jack! SF3 was our latest “big break,” and we did a great job on that project. It might be my favorite thing we’ve done, as it set the table for so much work in the future.

YDKJ was special because our office was in the same building as Jellyvision, and they were just a super rad group of people. We were lucky to get to work with people like @evanjacover and @_allard every day, and we all worked together to make something special.

It was around this time that I realized something very important: If you and your company don’t have an identity, and I don’t think most young companies do, a lot of advice you receive from very well-meaning, smart people is basically worthless.

The reason for this is the company and its leaders lack the tools to determine if any given piece of advice is applicable to them and their company. Example: I was continuously told that I needed to grow and own IP to build a valuable company.

This was not applicable to IG, and therefore potentially dangerous to act on. Our goals are to build a business that’s here to stay. To build a developer that can weather any storm and emerge better, stronger, faster for foraging out into it.

And while it’s possible to build new IP and sustain a healthy business, it’s not possible to do that without a nice nest egg in the bank. If I had pursued “building value” at that time it would have been at the expense of our stability, which is what I actually cared about.

Until you know who you are as a company, you need to really scrutinize any piece of advice that otherwise brilliant people may give you. It may end up being bad to act on. This applies for people as well, but I think knowing yourself is even harder than knowing your company.

If you manage to figure this out, please let me know the secret.

That being said, I would like to extend thanks to a group of people that sat with me when they had nothing to benefit from it and let me pick their brains: Andrew and @MikeJMika of Other Ocean, @DeathBot9 from GPG, and Doug from Next Level Games. You are all class acts.

Thus concludes Year 3. We got a lot of important work done and hired the future COO of the company. Year 4 to follow shortly.

Year 4 was about growing, in terms of headcount and capabilities. I’ll cover headcount first. For a long time I was nervous about growing. One of my favorite business books is Rework, and in it the book discusses company size a lot, and the perils of growing for growth’s sake.

We operated with 30 people for a long time, I was confident we could handle growing. But I kept asking myself “why should we grow?” There’s a strange “you’re either growing or dying” that’s kind of ingrained into you as an owner. I’m not sure where it comes from, but it’s toxic.

It’s a classic just-because-you-can-doesn’t-mean-you-should situation. Content with that understanding we stayed the same size for about a year. Then I had a very counter-intuitive epiphany: We had to grow to improve stability. We had to grow to reduce risk.

At 30 people, we worked on between 3-5 projects at once. I realized is that if one of the projects got cancelled (and we learned in year 2 that a project being cancelled isn’t necessarily related to your performance) I’d lose 20-33% of our income, and I’d have to do a layoff.

Factoring in money in the bank and average time to land new deals, it seemed like we needed to get to around 75 people to be where we could gracefully handle one project getting cancelled on us. Understanding this--and acting on it--were two different things.

I was still doubting my instincts and decision-making process with respect to business stuff. Even though I had been doing the job for three years, the voice in my head was always saying “you don’t have any training in this stuff, go slow, measure twice, cut once.”

So, I sat with the idea that we need to grow to get stable for quite a while. After about six months I hadn’t changed my mind that growing was the right thing to do, so we finally went for it. In early 2012, I reached out to @tcarbone.

Tom was one of my first bosses in the industry. He taught me everything that’s important about game dev, and he happened to live in Orlando, a city on our short list of potential locations for the 2nd studio. Tom was teaching at FIEA, but I eventually talked him into helping out.

I knew/know Tom about as well as I know anybody. This made it possible for us to open up a new studio without one of us moving to Orlando for 6 months to get things rolling. Tom dealt with all the logistics that allowed us to get Iron Galaxy Orlando up and running quickly.

IGO’s goal was to have a staff of 10 by end of 2012, so we put feelers out to around 20 people that we thought might be interested in joining us, 16 accepted. We exceeded our staffing goal in the first month. The IGO team (mostly) started work on MvC Origins immediately.

There’s a lot to go over wrt building a new studio when you have an established culture, but I’ll save that for later. This is getting long, and I still need to cover growing our capabilities (aka the Wreckateer story), so I’m breaking year 4 into two chunks. Part 2 coming soon.

At this point we had worked on a couple different Kinect projects. First assisting dev on Space Pop in Kinect Adventures, then Gore Verbinski’s Matter prototype for Xbox (Google it), which is a thread in and of itself. But we’ll save that for another day, okay @KeyserSoSay0?

After that, Microsoft felt like we understood the Kinect and were in a unique position to make some cool games for it. The entire studio came up with different ideas for what that game could be, and we settled on what would eventually become Wreckateer.

The original pitch for the game was a lot darker in theme; we wanted bodies getting blasted apart, spewing blood and what not. You can actually see some of the original prototype videos up on IG’s YouTube if you’re into that sort of thing. But I digress.

This was the first, from-scratch, original game/IP we ever got to create. We had all done that before at other studios, but this was the first time we got to do it as IG. We had to hire for design, art and audio roles for the first time. It was a lot of new stuff all at once.

Being that this was our first original game—and I had no idea if we would get to do another—we ended up contracting more roles than hiring full-time, and this was a good decision. Wreckateer was a big break for us, but no break is big enough for us to ignore our core values.

Enthusiasm for Wreckateer remained very high at MS. They ended up doing two (maybe three?) extensions on the original deal because they believed the game could be a great showcase for Kinect. MS believed in us, and I’ve always been appreciative of that fact.

They liked us so much, in fact, that when they decided to bring back KI they let us pitch on it. It ended up going to Double Helix at the end of the day, for a handful of good reasons, and we were disappointed. But in hindsight, doing KI at that time would have been bad for us.

Double Helix had more experience doing fighting and fighting-like games, they had an engine, and they were just generically better than us at that time. Finishing Wreckateer while starting KI would have been disastrous. At the end of the day it worked out best for everyone.

A brief digression into how bad we were with pitches at this time: In this phase, we still definitely had a startup mentality, and that meant we ran every aspect of the business as lean as possible. We didn’t have people sitting around to work on pitches and prototypes.

But once we agreed to do Wreckateer, we were also committing to trying to get more games like it in the future—if you hire designers, they need something to work on. We kept cooking up pitches, and while the ideas for the games were cool, the pitch materials were ass-tier.

No videos, little art…just wall after wall of text. Exactly the opposite of what a good pitch should be. Frankly it’s amazing that we got any original game signed at this point. Shoutouts to @TheArtButton and @HeadlessKurt, we did the best we could with what we had

Wreckateer was also our first experience in promoting a game. MS sent us to PAX East, the XBLA Showcase, and E3 to demo the game and do interviews. I was not comfortable with any of this stuff at that time. It was definitely a trial by fire, but it was very exciting.

When MS decided to put the game into Summer of Arcade, we were over the moon. If you’re unfamiliar, for a four-year run, having your game in SoA was like getting a winning lottery ticket. Everyone on XBLA bought the SoA games. It was a virtual lock the game would succeed.

Imagine our surprise, then, when it did not. I can still recall the ship party. Spirits were high, everyone was having fun...until we checked the leaderboard. It wasn’t getting larger as the night went on. Maybe it's a bug? By bedtime I think it had 2000-ish entries.

This was emotionally devastating, but I gave myself one day to be sad about it, then moved on. After all, we still had other projects in the studio that needed to come out. It was just another lesson that needed to be re-learned. Making a living on original games is *hard*.

Thinking about this now, it’s probably for the best it flopped. If it came out and did big numbers, we might have done something stupid like flip the entire studio over to original games. Shoutouts to Wreckateer, you were great and you died too young. Fs in the chat.

By now, our staff now more closely resembled a normal game studio. We still mostly consisted of programmers, but now we had people in all disciplines. I felt like we were ready for any challenge. We weren’t ready, and year 5 showed us that. Year 5 coming soon.

Year 5 was a series of highs and lows. The highs mostly revolve around Divekick, and the lows revolve around business development struggles. I’ll kind of gloss over Divekick, because I feel like if you’re reading this, you probably know a lot about that already.

Short version: One of our designers, @TheKeits, and some of his friends, made the Divekick prototype in their spare time. We loved it as soon as we played it and bought it off of Adam’s team to bring it in-house at Iron Galaxy. Working on Divekick was special.

For whatever reason, it fostered a camaraderie in the studio I’ve only seen happen on a few projects. Even people not on the project would play it daily and give feedback. We had cross-studio tournaments, and the competition got intense. RIP the Divekick title belt.

The game came out and did fine, not what we hoped, but fine—but boy did we learn a lot. Once released, we received criticism that some of the content in the game was problematic, or even explicitly racist. We didn’t handle this feedback well.

I don’t want to speak for everyone in the studio so I’ll just speak for myself here. I made the classic big white guy mistake of not listening to criticism, especially stinging criticism. If Divekick is in any way shape or form racist, then I’m racist, and I’m not racist, right?

Instead of listening to people trying to help us, I ignored them, or worse, even argued with them. After a while I jumped on the phone with @pattheflip, and he tried his best to explain to me what I was doing. I didn’t hear you then, but, Pat, eventually I got it.

Divekick taught me that when marginalized groups are telling you that your actions are hurting them, you listen and learn, not get your nuts in a bunch. So, if nothing else, I’m a better person because of Divekick - it just took a while. Thanks for bearing with my growing pains.

I’d like to take this chance to apologize to everyone that tried to talk to me about some of the content in the game, and to whom I didn’t listen. Especially @JoshYTsui, who tried several times to talk to me about it, only to have me ignore him.

If you’d like to hear more about Divekick, I talk a lot about it in this GDC talk. Check that out here if you want:

Now, onto the business development problems. While all that Divekick business was happening, part of the studio was working on the Hawken demo for the Nvidia Shield. It was in their keynote that year and it was a pretty big deal.

The deal in place was only for a demo, not the full game, but our contact and Nvidia was working with us to try and get the full-game budget greenlit so we could swing into production as soon as the demo was done. I was super excited about taking this project on.

This deal was, for about six months, about a week away from getting done. I kept chasing it, preparing a new budget, coming up with a new schedule, over and over again, all in hopes of nailing this deal down. After about six months, I finally realized it wasn’t going to happen.

Now don’t read this and think Nvidia screwed us because, as it turns out, this happens pretty frequently, sometimes deals just don’t work out. The lesson I learned on this one was: Don’t over-index on one potential deal at the expense of others. Don’t fall in love with a deal.

If you need one deal you should be chasing down five. If you need two you should be chasing down fifteen. From a sales perspective it just comes down to probabilities. You need enough potential deals in the funnel to guarantee you get however many you need signed.

If you think you’ve got a 5% chance to land any deal you come across, and it normally takes 3 months to figure that out, you can calculate how much time and deal-flow you need to guarantee you land something. It’s not that tough to understand, but here’s where we learned it.

Knowledge usually comes at a high cost, and the cost for this was six months of a very tight checkbook. Back then, I think the studio cost around $400,000 per month to run, and we were just scraping by. It really, really sucked.

There’s a bond between business owners that have ever had to struggle with payroll. When I talk with other people that run studios, we all have the same story when things get tight. Waking up to panic attacks, constant anxiety, and an inability to see the big picture.

But once again, from this hardship I learned a super-valuable lesson. For the first 4-5 months of this cash crunch I kept it to myself. I was worried that if anyone knew about it, everyone would bail immediately, and I’d be left holding the bag.

Eventually, I got the most senior staff together and got it off my chest. I said “Hey look, long term we’re fine, but you deserve to know what’s going on right now.” And to my surprise, none of them seemed overly worried, nor were they about to dust off their resume.

What I eventually figured out is that trust and loyalty are like a bank. Every time you keep a promise to an employee, good will goes in the bank. Every time you walk what you talk with respect to your values, good will goes in the bank.

Likewise, when an employee gets bad news, their bank balance takes a hit. But as long as their good will balance is still positive, they will trust what you’re telling them. When people say they have a “good” boss or a “bad” boss, they are just expressing their bank balance.

This was an incredibly powerful concept to finally understand. It actually incentivizes honesty and transparency.

In year 5 we definitely took our share of bumps and bruises, but I wouldn’t trade that year for anything. We learned so much as a studio, and I grew a lot as a person. In Year 6 we’d start to reap some of the benefits from that. Coming soon.