Video Game Startup Guide: Step 2

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

So you have your short, one-word company name and have acquired a domain name. What you need now is a logo for your company. Fortunately, this is harder to screw up than picking your company name. What you're looking for is the name of your company in a unique, non-repeating font that's embellished with a complex graphical style.

I'm no typographer, but I'll do my best to guide you through this step. First, you need a unique font. Don't take an existing font and modify it; go and find somebody from the Type Directors Club who designs original fonts. Commission that person for a unique font and get a graphic designer to add highlights, shadows and maybe a rich, graphical icon representing the name of your company. What you want is a big, memorable logo that is interesting to the eye and full of detail. Blizzard does it well; they have a big blue logo that even looks cold. Valve doesn't have a stunning logo per se, but they use the scary Valve guy in their games' splash screens. Nobody forgets a face like that.

Some logo styles to stay away from? The DICE guys have a lovely bit of modern art on their site, but you could mistake them for architects if you didn't know better. Novalogic also bores us with their plain Jane logo. Don't fall for a "Web 2.0" style logo and resist calls for restraint. Be bold.

With your name and logo well in hand, it may be time to consider where you set up shop. The good news is that with few exceptions, nobody really cares. You can only go up in stature as you move your headquarters outside of the continental United States. Consider fashionable places like Hawaii, London, or Hong Kong. Or just vacation there and file corporate documents in that country as a tax dodge. And if you happen to be based outside of America already, let me say that I hope the machine translation of this document is helping you win challenge very good. Your mother paints salty phone books with her batteries, yes?

Regardless of where you go, you'll need to find a development team. This is also a no-lose situation, but you can score bonus points with gamers by publicizing your staff hirings. Below is a list of "who to hire" in descending order of prestige.

1. Developers laid off from another company
2. Modders
3. Students fresh out of a video game college
4. Random homeless crack addict
5. Lorne Lanning

Ha! Just kidding about that last one. Number five should read "Derek Smart." The best thing you can do is scoop up a team of programmers who recently got the axe. Gamers are incredibly sympathetic to job losses; who's gonna patch the rushed-out game now?

So you've got your company, logo, location and have hired a few flunkies to actually program the game. An important hidden step here is to not tell anybody. You don't get any more first impressions in the gaming world than anywhere else, and you need to save your company announcement until you have something to show people.

For step three we'll really get cracking: it'll be time to decide what game to make, or how to properly format the game idea you already have.