The Story of Shadow Shrimp Studio LLC

Devin Good

The Story of Shadow Shrimp Studio LLC.

For those of you that have been diligently reading each of our blog posts, thank you. This may be a little bit review for you, for the new people, welcome! As we are now 4 weeks from release I wanted to do a brief recap of the development history for us and touch on some of the more business side of how we handled things here are Shadow Shrimp Studio.

Our history starts in October of 2017. We are all students finishing our degrees at Indiana University this month, so we were Juniors when we began this undertaking. Young pups in the game design world with extravagant ideas of what was possible to make with a team of 8 students who have other classes, jobs, and obligations. The amount of growth I have seen out of my now coworkers makes me proud every day. Before I go down that rabbit trail, lets get back to how we designed our game and formed our company. As part of the IU game design program, during our Junior year every student gives a pitch for a game to their fellow classmates. I had a rough draft of Batteries Included in my head and had a thirst for making a VR game. I think that came through because I somehow managed to convince 3 of my classmates to drop their pitches and join me. The next step of the process was rapid design and prototyping of the game. Hunter Bobeck, Julian Povinelli, Alex Bowling, and I worked our tail ends off to get a working prototype out the door and make it through our first Workshop Class. This was a series of making a viable vertical slice of our game and giving presentations to the rest of our classmates all going through a similar process with small teams and small projects. Scale had to be small in those days. Looking back now, what we thought of as small scale was still massive. During our update presentations, professors and fellow students could weigh in on our progress and decide if we were keeping up or it was time to cut the project and reallocate each of us to a new project. Only the strongest and most viable projects would survive. Workshop Class 1 culminates with the “Shark Tank Presentations” where the surviving projects face a panel of 4 industry experts that fly in and listen to the remaining pitch projects. We yet again survived the cut with a strong performance and candor from our presentation.

So, we went from 30 pitches to 6 teams to only 4 after the Shark Tank Presentations. Only weeks after the presentations another team would be cut so to this day only 3 remain. From the fallen teams we would pick up 5 more members. Meaning our team grew over 100% in 3 weeks. That was not an easy change for anyone. To drop a project that you put your all into and sign on to something entirely new and adjust to a new team dynamic is a massive challenge your first time. I can attest that our program puts its students through hardship to produce very strong workers for the industry. Now back to the design side, none of us knew how to rescope a small project when your studio increases over 100% in size. That showed clearly as we floundered to agree on new designs, new positions in the company hierarchy, and what our game truly was at its core. For those of you following current events in the game industry right now, that might sound all too familiar. I am thankful that we had this experience to learn from now. We know how to recognize and speak up when something “doesn’t quite feel right” about a design.

While going through the massive expansion and design crisis, we also had to form an LLC. Something that none of us had ever dealt with. We received guidance from our professors on contract formation, but the rest was left for us. Thank god we live in the time of the internet. I was in charge of forming the business bank account, registering the LLC with the state, registering with Steam, and establishing ourselves on social media.... to be continued.