Buffalo Game Space:

[Darus Grey]

Wanted to start something about a project I've been working on for the last year and half or so.

Forgive me a little self promotion, but we're on KS trying to raise funds to move to a bigger place, and expand our operations and services.

Help support the Buffalo Game Space!

Me as a person, my work history, if anyone wants to connect...or just troll me XD
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/volker-einsfeld/37/400/702

So I've been doing the Indie thing for the last three years, working on a game project that I ended up scrapping due to being unable to find a reliable artist to collaborate with, while living in an area that wasn't exactly game developer friendly. We have tons of schools in WNY...if anything education is our biggest export, some of the best schools in the entire state and very little opportunity around those schools outside the banking and health sectors.

Doing Indie stuff felt pretty lonely, so eventually I said fuck it, and started seeking out some other people, there were no groups, no meet ups, etc at the time. Nothing.

So after awhile I met just a handful of people, and we started something. We held some bi-weekly meetups, got a few more people here and there, and eventually had enough folks that we couldn't just keep meeting up in bars. A local business was very generous in donating us temporary use of an empty warehouse they had, and we converted it into a space to develop games, hold game jams, and our meetups.

After awhile, talking to other industry guys, local devs, etc. We began to understand that there's actually this really huge gap between Indie Developers and a real studio(AAA, A? B?).

There's a lot of upfront investment in equipment and resources to move beyond the indie stage if you have anything short of a run-away success, and there's a huge amount of knowledge and technique that is not being shared among indie devs(not purposefully, we just aren't communicating outside very specific regions!).

So we talked about how to improve this, and we came up with the idea for BGS. The biggest areas I constantly saw people struggling with were:

• Connecting with people to help finish, coders looking for artists, etc.
• Marketing, people had no idea how to market their products.
• Legal/Accounting. Most indie developers didn't realize that by releasing a game, they were becoming business owners and entrepreneurs, and weren't prepared for the process of setting up a company, or getting their games on platforms like Steam, Sony, Nintendo, etc. As well as the liability issues inherit(something highlighted in indie game the movie) in not having clear contracts with people.
• Having space to actually work. Some people do just fine at home, but most people perform better with a dedicated work space outside their home.
• Access to equipment and software, in game development, It's really hard to replace some commercial options with OSS. We frequently would have people with amazing portfolios in art and music, but no immediate access to good computers, mixers, etc to actually do work with once they were out of school

So we set out to change that. We wanted to create a space where people could get all that and more!

My personal goal was to bridge that gap between studios and indies, to allow indies to make much higher quality games without having to expend a lot of upfront capital, or dramatically expand their team sizes.

So we started up BGS as a nonprofit(pending 501(c)(3)) so we could act as a sort of publisher/incubator for these groups.

There isn't really anything out that like this specifically for games, There's the LA gamespace, but they're more focused on the artistic end, rather than the business end of things.

I really just want to help indies be able to make something besides shovel ware, cause it really pains me to see people make a lot of "safe" choices in their design because they have so much riding on a game. I feel like if we can take a lot of that burden off them, they're free to try more innovative concepts.

Anyways, that's my story!

If you're interested check us out, if you have any questions just post em

[Edelweiss]

Game development and Buffalo, NY are like the last associations i'd ever make... lol

At least we'd be known for something besides sports failures I guess.

[Darus Grey]

Everyone's raving about the Bills this season...I'm just waiting for the bomb to drop...hah.

Overall I've been pretty surprised though, we have roughly 70 indie devs in our fold. With some small hits actually starting to come out now that we've been collaborating more, such as http://www.shutshimi.com

You actually currently live in WNY or just from here?

We're actually hosting Rumble in the Tundra 4(upstate NY's largest fighting game tournament http://rumble.watch) this weekend at the current game space. Come drop by if you're around!

[Darus Grey]

Being a good neighbor and bought some ads on the forum...that most of you probably block anyways! :0