My journey to gamedev world. (part 3)
I’m at a Walmart checkout with four shopping carts full to the brim with home appliances, on the other side two guards are making sure every single item is being scanned and payed for, there are some people staring and all this attention makes me uncomfortable, I’ve always been more of an introvert and usually try to avoid this kind of situations. So why am I shopping all this? well, it’s December and somehow Chronograph ended up being the one paying for the International Company’s Christmas party gifts to the employees with a big chunk of the money they had paid in advance for our graphic design services.
The meeting with Andres’s successor didn’t went too well, from the minute we sat at the meeting room it was obvious she wanted nothing to do with us, when I picture her in my mind, I find it very fitting to say she looked like Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter, with her fake politeness demeanor and forced smile; Rod tried explaining the reasons for the four-month contract and the long relationship that existed between our businesses and the status of all the ongoing projects besides this one but you could tell she was just nodding politely, all she cared for was ending the relationship as fast as possible and getting the most of that four month payment back somehow. The company’s headquarters were changing the visual identity of the whole division and they would manage all the local implementation in house so there was no longer any need of Chronograph services, so she was using the money they had paid us for buying the presents for this year’s Christmas party, — I’ll send you the list.
I could have argued that the contract specified graphic design related services and going around town buying home appliances was nothing of the sort, but that would have meant risking damaging the relation even further making things even worse for Rod, given there were still some ongoing projects between them. One week later she sent the list, a spreadsheet with pictures, prices and quantities.
Rod, his girlfriend Paula and myself went shopping for the best deals and ended up saving around 25% , every peso we saved was one she didn’t get to have back, between this and the utility margin of buying the presents for them we got to keep about 40% of the total amount, and this meant Chronograph was truly debt-free! Now I could finally concentrate on doing art and illustrations for video games.
We would rock this out, me at the head of this ship called Chronograph: navigating the waters, locating possible customers, keeping the deck clean and everything in working order, getting my hands dirty doing some illustrations (learning to be good at it at least); and my hired illustrator Pablo doing the heavy lifting: making most of the art, characters, items and everything in between.
I quickly realized I knew nothing about the video game industry, neither locally nor internationally, I had set sail bravely looking ahead without a compass or even a map to guide us, this was fool of me and the sea is not often forgiving.
The first think I thought of was doing some research, ¿What is the state of the video game industry today?¿Who are the strongest players?¿What is the value of the video game market globally? ¿Where is Mexico in this picture? ¿Is my country even a player here? I was surprised by the data, I would have never believed that the predicted video game market value for 2021 is around $138.4 billion us dollars, or that there are 2.6 billion active video gamers today. Those numbers blew my mind, there is a lot of potential here and any business catering to this market can make decent money, working in video games is not such a crazy idea after all.
At this point we had nothing to show to possible clients, no previous work, no past clients that vouched for us, nothing, so Pablo and I started working on a fictitious project, we needed something that could showcase our abilities and what better project than a video game, our strong suit was illustration so we settled on creating a set of characters, some backgrounds,a few items and concept art, of course all of it had to have a theme and a story behind to set the mood and style, we were mexicans so of course we could also use the opportunity to showcase some of our culture and beautiful places. We ended up deciding to make the “game” about Real de Catorce, a small former ghost town with a long tunnel as the only way in or out, it was mysterious enough, and also the desert around it is one of the five sacred ceremonial centers of the Wixarikas, a local ethnic group that has remained almost “pure” since the Spanish conquest.
One other thing I found in my research was that Mexico is an important consumer of video games and video game related content, nonetheless there are very few mexicans working on creating video games and even fewer studios that have had any kind of success, this was as inspiring as it was discouraging, it meant we could be among the first ones to make it here but also that it was going to be really hard to do it, even just finding national clients that could be potential customers of our work would be difficult.
The end of the year came and for the first time in many years I felt happiness with an intensity that was contagious, at long last my feet were treading the road I have longed for, even if there were so many challenges ahead I didn’t cared, they didn’t mattered, just obstacles to sort and learn from. No one saw the monster lurking in the shadows ahead, so big and powerful that it would beat down experienced players and businesses around the world like flies. What possible chance stood a new and unprepared player like me? The first mentions of Covid started broadcasting on the morning news, 2020 had arrived.
