GameSmith is now RapidFire Studio.

And now, an explanation:

RapidFire is my third company. I’ve been an entrepreneur since my mid-20s and have never had a company I started fail. I’ve had my share of individual projects fail but never a company that I had committed to.

My first company was bricks and mortar (a PR agency). We carried heavy staffing requirements and had an 18-month sales cycle (seriously). We were also majority foreign owned and therefore could not qualify for bank financing. It was a grind to say the least. Still, I didn’t give up on it and when I left the company (in the hands of my partners) to follow further dreams it was an established company turning a healthy profit. It still is today.

Next I started a software company that took a couple of years to really gain any traction. That isn’t because tech is slow — it was the fact that I had to start from scratch. I had to learn how to program, for one. My girlfriend (now wife) and I moved into a studio apartment to cut our expenses and I vowed I wouldn’t leave it until I had built a successful software company. I worked 16 hours a day for nearly two years until I could build my own software and also understood the market enough to sell it. To cap that period off we got married and moved into a spacious luxury condo about a year ago. Tough times followed by happy times.

So, back to failure:

One of the most powerful skills an entrepreneur can develop is knowing when to quit. It’s critical to be able to push though something no matter what. It’s also critical to know when to abandon things.

We recently talked about re-writing RapidFire’s first game on this blog. Since then we’ve actually rewritten that rewrite. Why? I don’t expect us to take over the world with our first game but I do expect that game to be fun. And I made the decision in our first six months here (will be six next month) that delays at the beginning are acceptable if the results are worth it.

Why add risk to risk by rewriting a game? Because the feedback on the first versions wasn’t strong enough. People thought it was interesting and some of the physics-based action was pretty cool, but I could tell there was no real click.

So we decided to rewrite it again. The new idea, which we’ll start talking about pretty soon, I feel is the right one. The people that I’ve discussed it with think it’s a fun idea. Most importantly, I think it’s a fun idea. It has that strange quality of being a new idea — going in a direction we hadn’t considered before — but feeling like the idea we were supposed to be making all along. Development is moving rapidly now and we’re still trying to get it out by mid-year. I’m confident we’ll make that target.

What does this have to do with our new name? 

I felt the same way about our name as I did about early versions of our first game. People would respond “ah, ok”. I got lots of “ah, ok’s”. And as much as I wanted to stick with GameSmith for the sake of consistency and not giving up on something, I decided to pivot with our name as well. 

I think it’s a sane choice. This company is very young, we’re barely known yet, and sorting out hiccups early on will give us a better foundation in the years to follow.

So there it is: a new name, a new (re-)revised game and our absolute determination to accomplish what we’ve set out to do.

We’ll have updates on the game soon.

When I started GameSmith I decided that we would build the company around a few simple ideas: quality, fun and originality. The first two are expected. If you want to make successful games they absolutely have to be fun and if you’re not ripping off your customers they should be made to high standards. The third idea is somewhat optional in game development.

The game industry seems to echo the film industry when it comes to originality. Original creations appear and often find financial success, but a large percentage of the industry focuses on the creation of sequels, clones and makeovers of tried and true concepts. 

Creating something that’s original is risky. You don’t have a solid roadmap to follow. Knowing if your idea has legs is hundreds or thousands of hours of development time (and money) away. We learned this the hard way when our original idea (a simplified, almost tower-defense like RTS game) reached baroque levels of complication trying to make it fun. In order to keep scope reasonable we tried to build a very simple RTS game. In the process we threw out most of the elements that make an RTS game fun.

We then had two choices: increase scope and add more RTS elements or change the main gameplay to something else. We knew we didn’t want to make an already growing project larger so we decided to pivot.

The most manageable game style we could come up with that allowed to keep our original story was that of a lone fighter crossing the galaxy. It would be top-scrolling and have very simple controls. We also thought a space shooter would be fun provided we could give it enough unique elements as well as keep the original depth of story we had planned.

We’re now a couple of months into this new idea and it is taking shape. A few highlights are:

1. Simple, arcade style controls. Four-button platformers were fun so why don’t we keep our touchscreen controls simple? Too many otherwise attractive games fail miserably when it comes to virtualized controls.

2. Interactive dialog. Relationships matter (especially with your co-pilot). Character matters. Who you are does effect the outcome. 

3. No DLC, IAP or other bait-and-switch crap. 

4. High price. No, really. Games are expensive to make. We want to make games that are not compromised by monetization strategies (see #3 above). That means we have to charge. We’re probably talking under US $10, but certainly not “freemium” or $0.99.

Some of the new art and gameplay in screens here.