Andrew Roper is a programmer with IndieSkies, a start-up developer comprised of 11 students from the University of Derby, working during their placement year.

As many readers will know, setting up a new indie games company is certainly an effort.

Even with previous games industry experience and investment cash, it’s tough. However, our setup was a different matter as none of the team have either previous games industry experience or previous incomes.

The reason? We are all university students, currently on placement year, and we've launched our own indie company, IndieSkies.

We founded the company on the 4 July, 2011, and the transition between university and starting our own company was huge, although it took a relatively short amount of time to adjust to. To be honest, the biggest adjustment was getting ourselves into a regular 9-5 routine.

Still, while the transition between university and starting the company was large, it was surprisingly smooth in terms of finding office space, setting up the company and sorting out contracts. Financially speaking, we are all chipping in money each month to help cover rent or bills in the hope our releases will make enough money to help fund the company.

Basic problems

Sadly, one of the biggest problems we found when we started up was the lack of internet access. It took our provider five weeks to get our connection set up and working, in which time it had sent the same engineer twice to twiddle a couple of cables around in the server room.

The upside to having no data access for five weeks was there was a much higher level of productivity, so we managed to get a lot of the games finished within the first month. As soon as the internet was switched on, productivity took a sharp dive. 

Our first day was spent at IKEA getting desks/chairs for our partly furnished office ... and eating meatballs.

Work started on the second day in the office and we sprung into creating prototypes for iOS games with Unreal Development Kit. Due to the lack of internet access, any software that we needed to download (updated version of UDK, Blender etc) had to be downloaded at home.

GameCity and networking

We recently got to show off our games to the general public and other developers at GameCity 6 in Nottingham. It was an amazing experience to see people playing and enjoying something you’ve worked on!

The feedback was received was very positive for all the games, though we’re still baffled by one person’s complaint that “the iPad screen gets dirty”. Some of us also took the opportunity of being at GameCity to meet other developers and do some networking, which so far has proved invaluable.

Getting productive

The games that we’ve created in this time include COR3 – a space action-puzzle game - Paradise Golf – a visually stunning mini-golf game - and Boulder Run – a competitive time-chaser in Aztec temples. All three of these games were made with UDK and are being released on iOS.

In addition, we developed a 30-games-in-one compendium for Xbox Live Indie Games, which includes a mix of original and re-imagined titles. All of this was achieved in a little under four months. 

A worthwhile risk

We took a risk by stepping out of the normal placement year approach of being employed and paid by an established business and accepted that we would have to finance ourselves.

Despite this, I have to say that the experience we’ve gained so far is fantastic, and we’ve proved to ourselves that we’re able to create a functional studio from scratch in the middle of university, with our final year still outstanding to complete next year.

We may not be getting paid yet, but I think we are all gaining experience that money can’t buy.
Thanks to Andrew for his time. 

You can find out more about IndieSkies at here.