Hello HN,
We recently just completed our AR Drone Simulator and are working hard to innovate upon it. We all know that without depth sensors and a better viewing device, AR is somewhat limited to mobile. Would love to hear some ideas generated for all of us to innovate the AR space.
Wow, timing is everything. I had booked my ticket 2 days ago for Berlin. I am finishing up my time at StartupChile and heading to Berlin after being convinced by many at SUP, that Berlin has many things happening. I needed a high quality affordable city, that was startup friendly and supported my photography addiction. Berlin hopefully will allow me the time to focus and finish my two iOS games.
I'm also finishing StartupChile and 24pfilms is flat-sharing with us in Buenos Aires right now. We're returning to London for a while but Berlin is still on our list (nowhere else in Europe is on our list).
As a recent indie game developer Kickstarter does somewhat look like a viable model to fund your development.
But like Hollywood, there is great stuff and there is crap with a lot of gray in the middle.
In my situation I am making a very small iOS twitch game built on the Unity3d platform. As most know the advantages of Unity is it's ability for delivery to a variety of platforms and rapid iteration of development. Our project will have 2 month development.
Our team is comprised of myself (Ex-EA, ex-Squaresoft and serial startup guy) a pair of outsourced programmers, a optimization and art integration programmer (ex-UBI) and a 3d artist. I will handle many of the art and sound tasks as well as the final call on things.
The budget is under $30k. I know this is doable and possible because I have a clearly defined budget, and experience to quantify this budget.
This game is to provide hopefully two things:
To quantify that a financial success can be built from this model. Positive Revenue versus Negative Revenue.
Build a core following of player who like our work.
To use the potential revenue to build a bigger project.
There will always be scammers and people who want to rig the system.
I have thought closely about using KS for our second game which will require a budget of $100k, but at this time I don't have the followers and the public cred (in my mind to validate the success of a kickstarter campaign) although we do have great a prototype, art and a working business plan and design doc.
Hopfully this first game/risk will allow us to grow into what we desire as a viable business model for all involved.
Two months sounds unrealistic to ship a polished game, even though Unity is a very productive platform.
I've done a GDC demo in Unity in one month with a team of about 7. It was a good concept demo, but not polished enough to release as a product.
I also shipped a Unity game in about 2 months, doing all the programming and art, with predictable results. The game-play needs polish, and let's not even talk about the visuals.
Games really do benefit from iteration. In some sense, this is the danger of trying to schedule a game project. It's a great way to build some life-less me too game. Often the most successful new games have had schedule disasters that forced almost complete re-writes.
Excellent info Benl. Having been on the startup ropes many times, your above points are key. I find that exercise has been a real boost to my mental health and allowing me new clarity of focus to problems.
Startups are very, very hard, the percentage of success is very small. The media and techcrunch make it look so easy...but there are many that do not make it any where close to the big liquidity. Mix in questionable investors, that are motivated by greed, salaries that need to be paid and a girlfriend that needs to get....
Maybe this is just me, but it would be nice to have an indicator (perhaps changing the color of the text box) to show who's leading the conversation/asking the questions.
I know not all of the roundtables will be in this format, but having it be an option when starting the roundtable may not be bad.
Well, I had applied to StartupChile and got accepted, but wanted to see how my luck would turn if I applied the same startup to YC. I would of prefered to be in SF with the great mentors and angels, but hey StartupChile give you $40k with no take of equity.
I'm curious what the acceptance rates are for StartupChile.
My impression was that if you were "good", and jumped through all the hoops in filling out the app (which are substantial), you're likely to get in.
With YC, it's probably an easier application, but you're not as likely to get in even if you're good. Good team AND existing traction AND communicate well is about as likely to get into YC as good team alone is to get into something like Startup Chile?
well that's when you (from previous round) are going.. i got an email yesterday from them confirming my submission and saying that the results will be out December 15. So Jan 16 would be a little early imo, for all the visa and paperwork will probably take longer. feb/March sounds more reasonable. :)
