I’m an Italian Unity developer with over 10 years of experience. I’m part of a small team of four people: two developers and two 3D artists. We usually work on VR projects and various types of 3D applications, but now we’ve decided to create a video game.
We’ve written a very detailed script and designed the game mechanics and dynamics. What we need now is funding (we’ve estimated around €250k) to start working seriously on our project.
We’re considering forming a company (we’re all based in Italy), but we’re wondering what would be an effective way to access the funds we need.
How did you approach funding for your indie projects? Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated!
Step one: do not assume you will get €250,000 for your first game. This is an amount of money that is difficult for even well established indie developers to get. If you said “yeah, this is our first game and we want this much” to a publisher, the worst case scenario is that you get laughed out of the room, while the best case scenario is that you get less than half that. Simply having experience with the hardware and coding side of things isn’t enough, because it doesn’t show any collective experience with making a game.
And even to get to the point where you’re asking publishers for money in your position, you’ll need to have at least a vertical slice, a full section of gameplay that vaguely resembles a finished project, with functional gameplay systems and a cohesive representation of what the game is going to look like. Also, if your game is a VR exclusive title, toss that out the window because VR projects aren’t getting any real funding at all in the gaming space because they simply don’t make money. VR penetration has effectively stagnated in the consumer market.
Unfortunately, from the perspective of investors, you have nothing. I’ve been professionally contracting for the past 8 years and the only time that the teams I’ve been with have gotten investors to even remotely pay attention is when we’ve had a vertical slice or demo to show them. A well thought out and highly detailed game design document was simply not enough on its own to be taken seriously, and it’s only become worse in the past few years thanks to the current state of the video game industry. We’ve even had to make due with very little money, our highest to date was ~$500,000 USD for a team of 15 developers for 18 months of work, so good luck getting anywhere near what you’re expecting for just four.
We’ve targeted standalone, mobile, and console platforms. We’ve never targeted VR because no one wanted to fund it.