How to Build an Indie Game Co-Working Space

[Music] [Applause] hey everybody oh I guess I am i perfect well we're gonna jump in there so here we are like a GDC right it's a week about talking about our favorite games but just for like a very quick moment I want to stop talking out games and instead talk about people right because Society has this nasty habit of celebrating the final product instead of the people and their journeys to actually make that final game or that final product right so hopefully you've noticed this recent trend especially in the game scene where you know no matter what kind of team you're on no matter what size your team is no matter who you are people are starting to really prioritize the community that they surround themselves in and today we'll be talking basically on how to build a co-working space right after our own bumpy road and with the hope to both warn you but also inspire you so most of

these lessons come from gain net a mess is an independent inclusive co-working space just for indie game developers right it's a place for okay it's a place for experienced Indies for motivated students all kinds of developers and again it's those folks you want to train themselves and people who really understand the challenges of making a game right and what that process is like it's a co-working space which means it's pretty much like a shared office people bring in their computers they rent desk we have a lot of events like an internal feedback friday or maybe a large monthly parties it's also important to give context for what game s is not right so it's not sponsored by any corporations or giant tech companies in like that right also being in San Francisco this is you know more focused just for indie game developers right so it's not just a general tech co-working space or incubate or anything like that it's a co-working space for Indies an indie game development so for a brief history we started planning this all in October

2014 we opened our days on the very first day of January a point 15 and then the people crazy enough to try this was your truly my name is Dylan Jones on the bottom at the Ottoman nord hanging Jim Fleming and hey everybody I'm Danielle flank so co-working there is pretty much five basic steps to starting and running your own co-working space and the first thing and probably the most important thing is your people you really really have to find a group because co-working exists in a group so you know there's this team that started pennant officially as an idea back in indiecade at 2014 and I was in the audience just like you and I was listening to this person from glitch City talk about their space and what they were doing together and I'm like oh my goodness this is the most amazing thing ever I want to go and I'm going to do this and these are only

friends and this is them down in LA well not all of my friends but you know and and I got them all together and we all got drunk and we stayed up really late planning what this space might look like and I woke up in the morning and I realized I was actually serious about it so i got on craigslist looked up a couple spaces and i sent out an email and you know the next day Dylan was back in SF looking at faces it was really amazing but uh but gayness isn't just here and isn't just these people it wouldn't exist with without a larger community and so for us that means meetup group so for the past couple years bode ill and I have been running different meetup group still and runs one focused on indie developers it has about a thousand members I run one focus on learning how to make games that has about eight hundred and you really really want to start with this kind of core group of people in order to round

out your space because the one thing that you don't want to do is open the doors january first and there be nobody in the space and all empty desks so it's great so you have a bunch of people what do you do not Dylan well you got to find the spot to put them on where they all are right so you got to find that home base and that's that second step in this process right and as always when you're starting something new you're gonna be filled with a long list of questions and that's okay right that's that's fine don't be afraid to just ask that's what we did literally sometimes we had friends sometimes we would just cold call or email people right and you know if you're thinking of doing that or if you're thinking of building a space like this right just shoot us a note right shoot other people are not like this is a game industry it's filled with a bunch of awesome people that want to help out you know we talked to folks down at which city who opposed to go a little bit bigger Robin hanukkah over at phenomena was kind of a given some great San Francisco real estate advice I used to work out of like a closet with mother Indies a double fine and they gave us

some good culture tips again so the moral decide is just ask right it's just ask in addition know where you can compromise this is always a big one but consider public transportation so it's easy for folks just to swing by your space right consider if your building is a DA approved and can you do anything to make it more a DA how many square feet to unite do you need keep in mind that when you're talking about square feet there's a Goldilocks there so you know you might want a big massive space for event the house all your friends in there but you know you don't want it to feel empty on the day to day when people are actually working there so where is your sweet spot and that'll change this the way I'll allow you to have I mean enough members to pay your actual bills right and if that's the case how many bathrooms do you need all those bazaars little questions like that and since for us it was just all out of our pocket price was definitely the biggest one and please know that you know the cheaper something is the more time it'll probably take you to fix it up like this

is a shot we almost moved into this like funky funky butcher shop here had like a meat hooks on the ceiling and some I got scale and stuff we fell in love with the spot on valencia but if you're used to making games right making levels or whatever you're probably not going to say hey we should check the zoning laws here first I we certainly I did that wasn't my first impression of it but when we you know went to the City Planning Department which you should totally go to matter what's to the year in to check check your property the City Planning Department we realized that we could actually get in some trouble for building like an office thing and maybe a resident central zone but eventually funnily enough I found this the cell phone picture of a computer screen that was showing a google maps street view of the outside of this property like that was the entire profile for this real estate piece of property and I said well this is like either like a classic craigslist scam or nobody else has visited this place and maybe it's the only spot we could afford and it'll be perfect for us it turns out that it was the latter so

it was a great space though it needed kind of work but I tell you this story because I mean this co-working spaces on the very brink of not happening at all right and if you can find or if we can find a spot and the real estate hell that is San Francisco I assure you all of you can go out and find as much cooler spots anywhere else keep in mind that we made those compromises that I was talking about you know sometimes we have a line for the bathroom and you'll have to make compromises to know where you want to settle on that know what your criteria are know what specific to you really think about this stuff is it you know what's your group if you have some founding members with that and you want like a grungy spot you want to clean our spot how big is it do you want a conference room you need a kitchen again how many bathrooms do you need to warn you about this process will see if this video whereas video might not work but it is to show you you can find it online it's a little flash forward GC video but it is literally us on our

hands and on our knees redoing all these floors literally white construction work and thankfully danielle new a ton about construction but it still took us like a month right with just a few of us of redoing all this stuff and hopefully you can check out that video and see it it's you know it's fun little video but you know what it also does is it also like edit out it edits out you know the really hard parts right that's a nice things about nice little videos it's just great little montage but please know just like making a game and when you're getting into this stuff I mean there be prepared for burnout and they're right I don't want to be up here and hand out rose-tinted glasses there was some incredibly physical and also emotionally hard work in there and I mean you can get just like a game kind of stressed out and emotionally burned at times and be prepared for that yeah so the other thing other than construction the other thing that you're going to get really familiar with my running and co-working spaces

spreadsheets it's all about numbers and I wanted to show this slide because what stood out to me when I was pulling pictures for this presentation is the time step up at the top so that's taken at 1051 p.m. on a friday night and what we're probably doing is pouring over this document so this is gameness startup costs we started game s with a budget of twenty four thousand dollars which sounds like a lot of money sounds like I mean it's a lot of money to me that's six thousand dollars from each of the four co-founders and but what you have to know is that landlords don't necessarily like to rent to new businesses it's very difficult it's not like running an apartment where they just want first and last they may want first last three months or six months of rent going in so with game nest we had to give our landlord sixteen thousand dollars just to get in the door skewed

right so we were left with only eight thousand dollars to do everything and that's getting chairs for 20 people that's getting desk for everybody that's paying all our business license fees that's getting a router and it's all the construction so it's painting it's ripping up the floors that eight thousand dollars goes by so quickly like boom boom boom boom boom hi and so you know just know that like when you're in the process of doing your build out and you're spending a lot of money things don't maybe don't seem like there's that big of a deal you just want to be careful and aware because otherwise you'll overshoot your budget by a couple thousand dollars and for me that's a lot of money so I just oh and you'll make mistakes like this is a receipt where we spent twenty-five dollars on a roll of tape you know it happens and try not to make it happen on a regular basis or maybe things are just surprising this

isn't one that surprised me when I was in college like mini fridges I think are about a hundred dollars right like that's about how much I paid however it's the mini fridge that we had to get for gayness with four hundred dollars because it had to be big enough to get everybody's lunches but still small enough to fit under our counter and it just had a bunch of weird requirements and so our reg cost four hundred dollars the other thing that you're going to really really want to pay attention to is your local cost and your ongoing operating costs not just your build out so I this slide if you look at that up in the upper right hand corner and that blue box is highlighted that's our running costs for the year and we did this spreadsheet ahead of time and our actual running costs came out to be about within a couple thousand dollars of that price that is what it takes to keep game messed up and running and so you know that's a number and that number

is neither good or bad it's just something that you have to be aware of and then once you have a number like that what you have to start doing math and matrix math so like what does that mean that means there's going to be a sweet spot between how much I charge people and how many people I can get in and for us in San Francisco that's three hundred fifty dollars for a full time membership the other thing that you want to do is you want to look really carefully at the bottom of the spreadsheet and our projected members number so I said earlier that like Dylan has a meetup group with a thousand people and that sounds like a lot of people but there's a huge gulf between people who like the idea of co-working in theory and people who actually give you money to co work with you and so you want to be when you're doing the numbers be as negative as possible like be mean you know so like our numbers we're like 16 of those will show up and I had the names of each of those 16 people and I'm

like okay and in the next month maybe I can convince another for people to join up and then maybe another for after that so I would do your budget with that kind of math in mind for us our break even numbers are 24 full-time people in the space and we do that but those are also really nice and conservative the other thing too is if you have a lot of members their quality of the space can start going down because it gets really noisy so there's a lot of balancing acts that goes on the other thing i really want to bet recommend with running your space is in helping you with the numbers is co-working software so we use co bot and that's a screenshot of it that and it's wonderful because it automatically builds our members it can so we can take credit cards which is huge like I don't have to have a credit card account set up with like a bank or anything I can just take them because what you don't want to do is you don't want to chase down all your friends every month for

like a check or like get in like some cash and like that keep track of it it saves you so much time and I want to wrap up with the fact that indie game development is very boom and bust I think everybody knows that not always you know checks won't come in for a publisher or we maybe don't make enough or just things happen so we take we take a security deposit equal to one month's rent and that's important because if somebody can't make their rent on the first in the month what I don't want to do is kick them out on the second they're my friends so what we just use the security deposit and if their checks come in if everything works they can reup everything's fine and if they don't everybody has a month to get used to the idea that the relationship is changing so those are those are the big numbers that I'd recommend yeah absolutely and you know you really need these tools but you can get back into making your game

full-time right instead of organizing the space full time that's vital and you know the fourth step here is staying true right it's staying true to what you set out to build we encourage you to make your own pillars like really decide what you early on as your small group write them down post them up on the wall saves them you know we came up with our pillars is being diversity community and great games so for diversity what's the best way to you know make sure that you're an inclusive environment and you know keeping it a safe space well we have between an application that says hey what what kind of games of you worked on in the past what are you looking to get out of the co-working space and do you identify as ending traditionally marginalized group and mostly that's you know for us but we can get a high level understanding of where we sit so we know when we need to do further outreach and start getting the word out there more and more I'm again if you have any ideas about this or anything else in between please stop and say hi we're always looking forward to hearing that kind of stuff and you know for our second pillar

is community right and one of the ways that I reflect on our progress that way is by looking at a series of of moments right I'll scroll through some of ours but this is only to get you excited about your own moments that you're going to have when you open your own space right you'll have these nuggets these little memories that'll make it all worth it I'm a sucker for nostalgia but half the reason I posts pictures onto the game nest twitter is so that we have like an almost scrapbook kind of thing and i encourage you to actually catalog your fun right this will be hosted Lost Levels we highly recommend events because it helps get the word out there for new members new potential members to join you it also keeps all your current members really engaged right it also makes it a destination and most importantly it unites your local scene you know your local game development seeing all under one roof and get involved with local airg artists or real world games help make your space like an

actual destination if that's what you're into you write one of my favorite moments was when we had the racket throw this crazy murder mystery extravaganza thing and I had a friend who actually found out about this event like randomly and showed up I said whoa what are you doing here and like honestly if that doesn't get you excited that's kind of like as good as it gets when you're running a co-working space so you know maybe it's the little things like you just want to get lunch with some friends and talk about the latest games you playing maybe it's being able to harbor Indies from out of town and they need some internet right maybe it's having the perfect place to host your favorite game jam or it's a giant giant tutorial room for teaching new developers how to make games right and really where else you're going to find a indie video game themed halloween right like unless you make that space that awesome may not ever exist right you have to go out and build that and that was one of the things actually that we really learned it was really you know once you build it it's so easy to enable these things you

know really all it takes is just encouraging your members to make their own event some of the most successful events we've had our like demon was a fortnight which is like a imagine a book club but with a video game so you'll put the same thing and then talk about it and also these monthly giant out of the shell parties that we have so these are just some posters that people make so you know get the word out about the space and again also we're having a party on Thursday you're all totally invited check that out online but you know just out of the show of fun parties like that again that that third pillar is helping to make great games and of course like that is mostly up to the Creator but when you're in these spaces right like you can actually totally help with that so I mean maybe it's pulling together for a booth that gamer act maybe it's just exchanging some information or saying the latest greatest hits on showing your game at indicate or maybe it's all having like at this case like a game nest booth where people at a play casting event you know can come and be giving you feedback it's just easier to organize that stuff and you're actually helping make games

get better with feedback and everything else in between right and get the word out of course yeah so all right great you have this wonderful spot you've organized a bunch of people you came up with all your startup costs and you have all these great engage members next thing to do is survive and there's a bunch of unexpected stuff like a kid couches don't fit in Honda Civics who but on a more serious note actually one of the big things that we deal with is security and access to the space so there's a couple different ways you can approach things one of the cheapest way to do it is just to give your members keys that presents a lot of problems though in that people lose keys people leave and they don't return them and like all of a sudden there's a bunch of security holes and it's a mess in your co-working space you will probably be a target you're asking your members to leave their

valuable expensive laptop tablets all the stuff that you know game development requires in your space and other people will want that so you just have to be aware of those things for us what we did is we got a 24 hour access card reader and that was surprisingly difficult to get we had to have somebody come out from a company and it took them about two months to come and install it even though we're calling them pretty much every day and be like I want to pay you money and they're like and we don't care so just be aware of that and every time that we've been broken into you know we've had to do more stuff and spend more money on security and the other thing that isn't necessarily surprising but is maybe a little bit more to factor than you might think it's stuff like dishes you know like we have a cleaning service that comes in twice a week and it pays and it cleans the place it does all of our kitchen it does bathrooms

that's all phenomenal but what are those off days like what happens when people like weeding dishes in the sink you know who cleans those it's probably going to be you just saying so be prepared for all that you know or like random stuff like that happens in construction this is the window that got broken and gained this and that happened the first day that we moved in and it took us another two ones to get it fixed you know just stuff is unexpected but it might not even be unexpected you to do to cost it might be unexpected due to time the other thing that I didn't realize about my co-working space is that all the lights are different sizes they're all different wat introduced and so I'd go to lowes and I think that's all the information I need to buy my stupid light bulbs well guess what I had to go back and forth close like five times in a day it caught it took an entire days worth of time when I'm trying to get this co-working space up and running to get light bulb unexpected you know and in as much as I love my members sometimes people you

know do stuff that you probably prefer them not to do so you also have to like talk through that with them a good way to do that is we have weekly founder meetings where we all such base with each other we talk about issues in the space we get ahead of problem we also have a slack that everybody in our space is on so if things come up and things are issues we can know about them right away because it's better to deal what's up or actively and then I guess one of the last things that was a positive surprise there are some I swear I was with I underestimated how valuable gayness would be as an event space so we've had companies and your you'll have a great bunch of Indies who are excited and you'll probably have companies reach out to you and be like hey can I help a launch party here can I do a developer event and you should say yes that is excellent they pay for my couch you know and you'll find your own surprises too so and I encourage you to do so

definitely I definitely under some game corporation sometimes do you have fun events there so most of all right it's just go for it I mean when we started this we had no idea to run it in a game co-working space so ask questions again just go for it and seriously if you have any questions just send us a note right to anybody you know hit us up on Twitter or whatever is best for you and most of all we're definitely looking forward to seeing all these brand-new in the game co-working spaces so thank you again everybody seriously yeah I you