Own business

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Today's lecturer was Natasha Skult Ceo & Creative of MiTale, www.natashaskult.com

"serious games"

  • education
    • For example JumpStart games, that have educational games for kids, or simulation learning for different occupations
  • healthcare and wellbeing
  • big brands
  • businesses
What does it require to gamify a product?
  • teamwork
    • Having a good team will help with your product, people with varied skills and backgrounds. It's good to be on the same page, but your team shouldn't be just yes men.  
  • expertise from various disciplines
    • The process is about learning yourself that it's good to understand that you don't know everything. Having help from experts and professionals is a good thing and will help making your game. If you're going to teach math's to children, using the expertise of a math teacher will help with the teaching process.
  • listening 
    • Listening your team, listening the experts, listening the client, communication is the key, all sides should be heard and understood.
Why gamify
Cheap + effective + supply the client demand
global impact + fast + available any time anywhere

Running your own business can be overwhelming at times, specially with small company where all (or most) the responsibility is on you.
For a game to be profitable, you need to follow data, and your end product should follow market demands. There's likely chance that nothing will be new anymore, so there's no need to focus so much on having a completely new idea, more working on your approach to it, and what you end up doing with it. When you are making games to sell, you are making it for others.
In a small team it is good to scope down and only focus on your core idea of the game, adding constantly new small things mid production will only slow down the whole process. Altering and adding things later on when core loop is good is a better way to work.

In running your own business, have reality checks. Even when you achieve things, it is important to work on maintaining it, if you don't keep on working on your games or projects it is easy to fall under radar. Timing is very important too, however it's difficult to see and find the right timing, and sometimes that just doesn't work.
If you can see the project isn't really working for the market, then it's probably better to let it go. (Kill your darlings)

Nothing is for sure, even if you do everything "right", your game and business might still fail, so have multiple plans what to do next if this doesn't work.

Start small, and grow from there, since it is much easier to pay 2 people than 10 people. 
Rejection is big part of business, you need to ask from multiple people, and ask for feedback if possible. 

Being able to work on a team is a big plus. And networking. Both which I personally am shit at. Okay not true, I am capable in working teams I am just very socially anxious at start. Networking is something I have big problems at.

Teamwork & individuality
  • What are you good at?
  • What you wish to get better at?
  • Is communicating hard?
  • What makes you unique?

Those questions from Natasha's slide, to improve oneself and to think of your best qualities. I wanted to have them here to be able to look at them later and maybe even answering them. 

Everyone makes mistakes, lot of it is about re-doing and finding solutions, in life it is rare to succeed on your first try, so trying is important.

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