I’ve spent decades in business and government as an IT professional, including founding an IT-centric company that has survived for nine years. Originally, I wanted to start something with a creative slant. Now, we are finally shifting the company in that direction: we’re becoming game developers.
The difference between my lengthy career as a leader in the City of Chattanooga‘s IT department and the company I founded is… interesting. Unlike the City, my company has always been small, which has meant being agile. We weren’t hampered by the same bureaucratic constraints as government entities, giving me a level of freedom I hadn’t known. I was able to do things my way—the way I believed was best.
And yet, there was always one thing missing: I couldn’t sell it. I believed in our work and I knew we offered great value, yet I never felt comfortable pitching.
Our move into game development is a different matter. We have the story, the background, the foundational software, and most of the skills, but we are only just beginning to develop our first game as a team. Despite being at the starting line, I’ve already begun selling the project with a level of confidence I never possessed in nine years as an IT provider.
I’ve spent some time thinking about why that is. I think I’ve figured it out, though the explanation requires a bit of technical detail.
As an example, we’ve always used Nginx as our web-server software. Over the years, we’ve mastered the techniques required to deploy sites that are exceptionally fast and secure. But here is the reality: it is software that runs on a computer. Somewhere out there exists a more-or-less “perfect” set of configurations. If someone understands what they are looking for and looks in the right places, those configs are findable. We can configure our servers with the best combination of directives, but someone else could find the right blog post, copy, paste, and voilà—they are doing exactly what we do.
When I worked for other organizations, all that was required of me was that I deliver—which I did. If the servers stayed up, the apps ran well, and we didn’t get hacked, I was lauded for my skills and, eventually, promoted into a position where I could no longer use them. I didn’t have to sell my tech; the tech spoke for itself.
Now, consider the game project. It will run on platforms that hundreds of thousands of other games run on. It will use mechanics shared by tens of thousands of other titles. It will include the elements gamers expect; if they love RPGs, they expect a new title to share a lineage with the last ten they played.
But because games are creative endeavors, our project will tell a story blended with our own interpretation of the genre. It will feature the graphical style, the landscapes, the towns, and the personalities that we envision. While it may share a genre with others, as a whole, it will be unique.
Unlike the servers my company maintains or the software products we support, our game isn’t a mechanical, repeatable process. It is a thing that has never before existed—something that even its creators might not be able to replicate. It is something that I, a person who has played video games since the beginning, actually want to play. It speaks of who we are.
I can sell this all day.
