I've come to bring the latest news on my independent business venture.

I am now formally incorporated in the state of California doing business as More Bit Entertainment, Inc.  Games will be released as a division of the company: More Bit Games, and hopefully people will just start referring to my company as MORE BIT!

I've begun work on my first project, which will be a polished rendition of my Round Table Billiards game.  At the moment, I've got all the balls behaving as a rigid body physics simulation (minus spin and collision with rails.)  I'm constructing the table at the moment.

The idea is to get a working simulation so I can get that out as a tech demo for testing and occasionally do some research to hone in the calibration of the physics.  Afterall, what exactly is the friction coefficient of felt?  Of an enamel ball?  Who knows?  But some real world tests and a nice video camera can help me tweak things via empirical comparison.

I want to talk about setting up the business, for those of you who may think about this in the future.

The first thing you have to realize if you want to sell games is that if you plan on making a profit, then you must get a sales tax license.  In order to get that, you'll need to register your company with the state.  I mean to say, desiring to make a profit pretty much forces you to establish a company.  Laws are likely different all over the world, so I speak in relation to the US.

When I started, I had $4000 seed money from my partner, and $3000 dollars of my own.  The $3000 supported me through the first month.  With the $4000 plus a little change on my end, I purchased a computer, retained an accountant, and paid to file paperwork for my company.

The workstation I built would cost anywhere from $5000 to $10000 depending on what company you would have make it: Dell, Gateway, or some little indie builder.  Since I'm a bit computer savvy, I decided to build it myself.  I basically built a powerful rig on a build site, then wrote down all the parts and sourced via Pricewatch.com.  Took about a week for the stuff to arrive, I went to the local Fry's Electronics to pick up some odds and ends, and put the sucker together.  Took about three days to build.  1 day spent acquiring small needed parts (like an extra fan, new keyboard, etc) 1 day assembling the CPU, and 1 day installing OS and software.

At the moment, I am using "trial" software, with the intent to purchase licenses in the near future.  Likely, just before going gold, I'll make a request to my partner for licenses.

I hired an accountant.  The necessity and cost of something like this will vary depending on your connections, friends, and such.  For me, the father of a good friend of mine is a CPA, and gives me a little discount.  I pay for office visits, should I need directions to do something complicated, or for filing taxes.  Each visit costs $200, but I get free phone consultation throughout the year.  This leads me into the incorporation.

There were a lot of options.  In the US, you can file under partnerships, limited liability partnerships, corporations, limited liability companies, S-corporations, blah blah.  After discussing with my CPA over how the business would run, we decided on an S-corp.  Which is basically like a corporation designed, tax wise, to favor the owners of a small business.  Part of the decision was due to the fact that we expected to have to deal with profits through sales, and that I would be acting, technically, as an employee and drawing a salary from the company funds.  Whatever is left in the company account after I've drawn a salary gets divvied up between me and my partner (after we're sure the account has enough to sustain the company through the next project.)

Incorporating is actually ridiculously easy.  All you need is a company name, and about $300 dollars handy.  You go to a site like bizfilings.com and fill out a wizard.  They draft up things like your articles of incorporation, print you stock shares, and build a corporate tome that contains all your paperwork and seals, as well as handling all the filing and acting as your "agent of incorporation". 

You might be saying, wtf!  $300 dollars!  But hey, its better than starting a large business where attorney fees can bump that cost up to $5000, having a CPA do the filing for you which can tack on another $5000.  If you can do like me, just hire an accountant to get you started, then file on your own.  If your business is small enough, you can get away with drafting some operating agreements, and just having a lawyer edit them (which I still have to do.)

Ok, so then, time to get to work!  I've been slacking on my planning duties.  Well, a little.  I have an abundance of notes, diagrams, and flow charts sketching out the structure of the game.  I've slowly been drafting a design document around these notes.  But the one thing that I have yet to do is make a schedule.  I'm currently operating on the optimistic goal of four months.  But after this week of work, I can gauge what I'm truly capable of working full time.  I'll use this to formulate a milestone production schedule.  And then I'll work diligently to stick to it.

So far, I've been getting up and working from about 7:30 to 5:00 every day.  It suits me well, and I'm breezing through the process (w00t!)

I don't know what else to say at this point.  This is quite an adventure.  I hope I've given you some practical insight to starting a company and the work involved in doing it right.  Good luck to the rest of you, and wish me godspeed.

PS - another thing I have to do is design a company identity.  I'll write another blog in about a week talking about the importance of networking and having connections in various industries and how having friends in key places can pay off when it comes to the peripheral aspects of running a company.

Wow, its great seeing how quickly this has progressed.

Hope you start raking in the income soon.

Definitely great. I hope it'll become a success.

You've inspired me to start thinking about my own little company in the future. But I think I'm going to get quite a few years in the industry first before I attempt anything like that  :P

Oh, and that HL2 causes quite a bit of motion sickness. I don't think I've ever gotten really dizzy playing a 3D game before. But it's still great, heh.

It all sounds rather scary to me. Not inspiring. But I'm glad it seems to be working for you so far. Good luck with the income side of things.