Getting a game off the ground? Around here, help is easy to find. There’s pitch practice. There’s funding advice, and usually somebody at the meetup who knows somebody. So what comes next, once the money lands and the team is hired? That’s tonight’s topic.
Who’s presenting
James Smith is the CEO of BlackCap Creative, the Kelowna studio he founded. A local Sioux and Cree Métis entrepreneur, he started out in 3D animation and rigging before moving into real-time Unreal Engine work for clients outside traditional gaming. Over the past decade he has grown BlackCap into a dedicated games company.
These days he works as a game triage specialist. Studios bring him in when a project has gone sideways or lost direction.
Not all of them survive the triage, but his real goal is to leave the team better equipped for the next project.
He also co-hosts the Indie Innovators podcast, and he’s one of OGDA’s founders. So yes, we’re a little biased.
What the session covers
The Studio Survival Paradox picks up where pitching and funding leave off. Once a team is in motion, the questions change.
James’s argument is that momentum only helps if you know how to direct it. That’s an operations problem, and operations is the part of running a studio that never makes the trailer. Drawing on years of stepping into projects that lost their way, he’ll make the case that this unglamorous work is what lets a studio keep making games at all.
Who should attend
Any team that already has a game in motion. That’s really the point of the talk: a healthy dev scene has to back the studios already moving, so today’s indies stick around long enough to anchor the industry here and lift up whoever comes next.
Last month Clara Smith walked us through Unreal audio in First Steps in MetaSounds. This one trades nodes for spreadsheets.
Doors are at 7pm tonight, 460 Doyle Avenue in Kelowna.
Ready to level up with Okanagan game developers?