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Romanian Game Developers Association is something I’ve heard of about 2-3 months for the first time. Two guys (Andrei and Cristi, the co-founders), came to MavenHut’s offices to tell us about their idea: allow game developers meet and talk about their ideas, about the obstacles they face, learn from each other.

When we first started MavenHut the gaming ecosystem in Romania was almost non-existant. Yes, there are some great companies here, studios and local (from EA, Ubisoft and Gameloft to King, eRepublik or Revo Solutions), but people don’t really meet in a more formal environment. We were looking for workshops, for people to motivate and inspire us. And, step by step, we met a lot of great people in gaming. And it took us 18 months.

RGDA says it’s the right tool to help freelance gaming developers, small and medium gaming developers in Romania. If they live up to their promises, they will help the industry a lot. And there is a lot of interest in this. I’ve seen more than 100 people participating on a meetup about gaming, as well as about 40 people present at the launch of RGDA, last Tuesday. To show just how much people around the industry need this, Cristi, my co-founder at MavenHut, met 3 people that were building a Snake version, without knowing about each other.

Finally, we need to get together. Andrei and Cristi helped us with the first step, now it’s a lot up to us :)

If you are a game developer, artist or anything like this, go to RGDA’s site. And don’t forget to also contact us, at MavenHut, we are always looking for great people to work with!

Timisoara is a city in Western Romania, 600kms from Bucharest. This is how much I drove today to be present at Startup Weekend, first Timisoara edition. Well, I’ve also had some other things to do here, but I’ve been present to the launch of SW, nevertheless.

I have to say I am not a big fan of Startup Weekend. It feels… rushed and forced :) And, obviously, it’s this way by design, but I am probably getting old, because I wouldn’t see myself doing all nighters like this. Even if, while building MavenHut, an all nighter would be just part of the job (fortunately, not that many actually happened).

Today, while listening to the judging criteria I understood that Solitaire Arena and the idea of multiplayer classic games that pushed MavenHut forward would’ve never been chosen at Startup Weekend. Because we didn’t have nice graphics (something required, as I understood) or a great, specific need to fill (though boredom is one of the biggest pains of a human being).

On the other hand, though, I think Startup Weekend is a great learning tool for a startup newbie. Leadership, team work, focus, Minimum Viable Product building, all of these concepts have their place here. If I would be someone that wants to understand what working in a startup looks like I would go to Startup Weekend. By the way, they really need designers (in all startup weekends) so, if you are, you will be really valued going there. Startup Weekend means a lot of developers, business and communication people. And this is what a startup will actually need, at some point.

Finally, I hope the result of SW Timisoara will be that at least one team starts a product and keeps working on it afterwards. That would be a great success. On the other hand, the fact that about 100 people got together to create things together is already a big win :) I am just becoming a grumpy old man.

P.S.: Just to be clear: I am not a big fan of the concept for Startup Weekend. It’s a personal choice. On the other hand, I really think we need these kind of things to happen more often. Because we need more entrepreneurial people in Romania and this is the only way to make that happen: in small steps, one Startup Weekend and one meetup at the time. So, if I can help in any way, I don’t need to like it, it just needs to push the startup world one step further. Which it does.

The best games there are have great story and great graphics. Or do they? :)

Last game I’ve played from start to finish was Last of Us. Awesome story, the graphics were gorgeous. The art takes you and gets you hooked in the apocalyptic world of the game, making it alive and almost real. What would be a game without this kind of design?

Well, A Dark Room tries to do exactly that: use your imagination as the graphic designer. The “simplest” game in terms of design, since it runs in the browser, it is just a bunch of text with some actions you need to take as the game unfolds. And unfold it does, since I played on and off about 2 hours and there was still lots of things to do.

You start in a dark room, in a dark forest. And you start a fire. Then you need to chop some wood. Then you hear something…

It’s a great game, something I didn’t think I would see anymore, a reminder of the text adventure games of the Z80 era (like Zork or The Hobbit).

If you never played these kind of games it might look strange. But think of it as an interactive book and start playing it. You should be hooked in no time :)

P.S.: I’ve found A Dark Room in this list on reddit, a list one of my colleagues at MavenHut, David, found. Thanks a lot! This is how a weekend goes…

Have you ever heard of Oatmeal? Of Nikola Tesla? How about Matthew Inman?

This year I got to the United States for the first time in my life. I stayed there for about 3 months and the most interesting thing is that my first stop ever was not New York or San Francisco, as it usually happens with my friends, but Austin, Texas, for SXSW.

There’s a long story about my time there, but the best “unexpected meeting” that everyone gets at SXSW was the fact that I was going to attend Peter Thiel’s (or Elon Musk’s) keynote and, in order to get a spot, I went an hour early and saw Matt Inman, the brilliant mind behind The Oatmeal. I had no idea who he was (really!) and I didn’t understand why the room is filling to the full extent (and it was a huge room).

And then, the keynote started. The first slide of the presentation? The one above :)) With a vomit bag in it.

The keynote showcases Oatmeal’s social efforts, from fighting a troll site that wanted money from him to a Kickstarter campaign the raised $1,000,000 (1 million) in just 9 days to save a part of Nikola Tesla’s laboratory. He also talks about comics, creativity and he also says some “poop jokes”. The great ones, as he says in the beginning.

It’s a fun hour, you’ll laugh a lot, but you’ll also learn a little bit about the power of communities.

Have fun!

Working in gaming has its upside and downsides.

One of the downsides is that people always say: “Ah, so fun, playing all day, the perfect job!”

Other people dismiss it from the start: “Pfff, gaming! That’s not even a real industry!”

Even people close to me (good friends or family) have this false impression, that it’s something simple and cheap to do. On a casual talk with a friend, I mentioned a $2 million budget for a game. He was impressed and said: “That’s a lot of money! A game with a big budget, right?”

And… not so much (see the GTA5 numbers below).

Let me tell you some numbers about the gaming industry:

Global revenues in gaming: $56 billion in 2011 (the report here, page 5). In another report I have (not public), the numbers estimated for 2013 are closer to $70 billion.

The total market for casual/social/mobile games in 2013 (estimated) is about $18 billion.

Half a billion people play computer games. Out of them, about 150 million pay, in one way or another, for games.

The biggest money makers in mobile are:
– King’s Candy Crush Saga, more than $600,000 per day (yes, per day!) – Source: 1, 2
– Clash of Clans (more than $600,000 per day – source) and HeyDay (more than $300,000 per day – source) bring a big part of the $2 million per day revenue for SuperCell, the Finnish company that created them (source)

Finally, GTA5, the title launched last week, was in production for 8 years and, in the first 3 days, it had revenues more than $1,000,000,000 (yes, billion)! (source). It is the fastest selling entertainment product EVER! Before Avatar, before Titanic, before StarWars, before anything. And, to put it in context, it had a HUGE budget: $260 million.

Actually, I’ve seen some reports saying that the gaming industry surpassed the movie industry in the last 2 years or so (I can’t find the report now, sorry!).

Next time, when someone says “Pfff, gaming!”, just smile. You know better :)

Screenshot from Newzoo report

In the last two days I’ve used mindmaps for something we’re building. It’s the first time I ever used mindmaps and the learning curve wasn’t that easy.

Again, I use mindmaps to understand the stages of a game (what happens if… and if… or if…). It’s kind of similar to the logic schemes we used for algorithms in high school.

Back to mindmaps. The best tip I got for you is this: first of all, map the most desirable outcome. The one that SHOULD happen. It is gonna be so much easy to add exceptions to that.

I know, pretty obvious, right? Yeah, it wasn’t for me, at least in the beginning. And I re-wrote some parts several times.

Have fun!

P.S.: the tool I use for mindmaps is MindJet (OSX only, I think). If you have other suggestions, fire away in the comments below.

If you want to understand the VC world, read about investment, understand the views of both investors and ex-entrepreneurs, there are some blogs you NEED to read:

1. Both Sides of The Table – Mark Suster

It’s, in my opinion, one of the most outspoken blogs out there. They guy is a VC now, but he used to be an entrepreneur, so he always has good opinions from “both sides of the table”. I like his blog and some of the articles I recommend are How to Get Busy People to Take Action When You Send an Email (very important, especially if you are cold emailing, though you shoould look for an intro) or Why Startups Need a Well Articulated Strategy (And How to Think About Yours) (self explaining)

2. Feld Thoughts – Brad Feld

The co-founder of TechStars, he used to be an entrepreneur, also. He is also an accomplished writer (he and his partner wrote a book about the life with an entrepreneur which I’ve found really interesting, and he also wrote the first book I’ve read on investing, VC’s and the like, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist). One model of the articles you may find on his blog is this: Being a Great CEO

3. A VC – Fred Wilson

The first VC blogger I’ve heard of, Fred Wilson is a rockstar of the VC world. Writing daily since… whenever I can remember blogging, I’ve first found out about him from a Romanian blogger and entrepreneur that was always citing him (Dragos). Again, lots of articles, lots of info, you should look specifically in the archive. An interesting thing, he is a dedicated Android user, in love with the OS and what it means (so he mentions often the way he uses the mobile phones in his day to day life).

Do you know other VC or entrepreneurs blogs?

Photo from Shutterstock

When we started MavenHut there were just the 3 of us: me, Cristi and Elvis. And it’s been just us for the next 9 months, when we started to add new people in the mix. It wasn’t easy, because getting people to understand that the fact that we are a startup doesn’t mean that the company will cease to exist in the next 3 months is not as easy as it seemed initially.

Still, we managed to create a great team at MavenHut. And Cristi is gonna be at TechHub today, from 6:30pm, to tell you how it happened. Of course, not by himself, but by being part of a panel that includes Teodor Ceaușu (VP of Engineering and Country Manager for Romania at Ixia) and Robert Knapp (Co-Founder and CEO of CyberGhost). They will be talking about Building Amazing Team (in tech, obviously).

If you are, at all, interested to hear some tips on how to find people, how to help them be their best and, obviously, if you are in Bucharest, come to TechHub! Tonight, at 6:30pm, at another great meetup (I tell you, the Thursday meetups at TechHub will become the place to be if you are interested in startup and tech).

The interesting thing about these two articles is the fact that one is about startups (high growth) and one about lifestyle business.

The first one is Paul Graham’s article about raising money. I’ve met almost all the things he’s talking about there and it’s an article I would’ve loved to read about a year and a half ago. Still, even if you read it now and go look for investment afterwards I still think you will do as you think (after all, I would do it).

Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding, raise one or more later rounds to accelerate growth.

Reality can be messier. Some companies raise money twice in phase 2. Others skip phase 1 and go straight to phase 2. And at Y Combinator we get an increasing number of companies that have already raised amounts in the hundreds of thousands. But the three phase path is at least the one about which individual startups’ paths oscillate.

Anyway, go read the article. Just be careful, it’s a long and detailed one.

The second article (articles, actually) are from a blogger that likes bootstrapping businesses, doesn’t want VCs involved (he is more comfortable this way). He is involved in software business and he writes some great articles about it. The ones I’ve read are about a business he’s bought (HitTail) and what he’s done to turn it around. The process is still ongoing, so I think he will write more about it. Here is the first part (out of three): The Inside Story of a Small Startup Acquisition (Part 1).

I’m all about figuring out what’s going to make a person happy and then going after that with ravenous determination, instead of pursuing what we’re told is going to make us happy by the tech press (raise funding! exit big! lose control of your company and get fired by the board!).

So I tend to focus on ideas that have a 1000x higher chance of success than the next un-monetizable social website you have in mind, but the success I strive for is a bit more modest. Probably close to 1/1000th of the payout of a big exit.

He also explains the process of acquisition, including the metrics he looks at when doing this kind of purchase. I think you will really enjoy it, so go read it. And remember, it’s about lifestyle business, don’t compare it to the article about VCs and startups above.

As is the case with everybody that started to play PC games in the 90s, I’ve been a huge fan of adventure games (or quest, as they were called then). And you can understand my delight when I’ve seen that a lot of them get remastered for the iOS (iPad, especially) and Android.

Two of these games are some great games I’ve played then: two of the Broken Sword games. The initial one, though with a slightly longer story, a Director’s Cut of The Shadow of the Templars and the second one called The Smoking Mirror.

The first game is a classic and the first image of the game, with a Paris cafe in the autumn became an image any adventure fan would recognize. The characters of both games are George Stobbart and his girlfriend, Nicole Collard, an American guy and a French girl. She is a journalist that, of course, gets in a lot of trouble, while he is a “normal” guy getting involved in everything bad that his girlfriend generates (always women, right? :P ).

While the second game is not, in my opinion, as good as the first one, its presence in the App Store helped a long flight go far faster than I thought initially.

The games are point and click type of games (ok, point and touch!), where you choose different actions you can do related to different objects so that you solve the puzzles you need to in the process of discovering the mysteries Nico tries to uncover.

The link to the games, for the iPad: The Shadow of the Templars and The Smoking Mirror. Have fun (it’s about 12 hours of gaming for each of them, just to give you a heads up!). The links for the Android versions are here: 1 and 2

Have fun!