#hope the devs are ok and that working practises improve and so forth

[felassan]

Mark Darrah's latest Mark Darrah on Games YouTube video, "Triage Games - So You Want To Start a Studio" is interesting and worth a watch.

The video description reads "So you want to start a studio? ENOUGH questions! How about some answers? Let me go through and answer the questions for myself", and contains a link to Triage Games' website.

Quote of interest from the video:

"So you wanna start a video game studio and I keep asking you all these questions. Why don't I take some of my own medicine and walk through my answers to these questions. First, a bit of a revelation. I arguably already have a video game studio, it's called Triage Games. It is a studio that exists at the moment largely to support my consulting business."

He explains that Triage Games sometimes focuses on helping out other studios, and sometimes focuses at other times on game development. It's not currently doing any game development on its own at the moment. He continues:

"Let's talk through the questions and talk through what my answers would be. Why? I left a pretty high-paying job back in 2021. Money would not be the reason for me to start a studio that would be making video games. I could in all likelihood find another Executive Producer job and go back into the industry at a AAA studio and basically go back to the job I had before. So if it was about money, this is not the way to go about it. Three years ago, four years ago, five years ago, I could certainly see spite being one of the answers that I would give for the 'why' question. I like to think that I've moved past that. Like I said, spite is an effective fuel but it burns really dirty so getting yourself off of that kind of motivation is a healthy thing to attempt to do."

[source and link to full video]

also, assuming that Mark's consulting on DA:D is via Triage Games or that Triage Games as Mark's studio reflects his strengths and what he can be hired to consult on/regarding. considering that, here's some info from Triage Games' website on some of the services it offers. presumably the stuff focused on the end of a game's dev cycle is what's relevant to what it could entail, being that DA:D hit the Alpha milestone.

"FROM STARTING GUN TO FINISH LINE [...] And the end: Triage Feedback Response Finishing

Start Strong - Set your processes and structure up to help you build the game you are trying to make - Develop a culture of "Completion Urgency" to get more done and use completion to drive quality - Craft your pitch to lean into your storytelling strengths and cover your weaknesses

Finish Stronger - Know when your feature is "Great Enough" - Reacting to external sources of feedback and integrating new ideas into your planning without destroying the plan - Prioritizing bugs, issues, features, and changes to guide your game through the final stages of development

Process - The way that you set up your team sets up the cultural norms that form of that team. How do you want your team to react and respond - Processes like the Hourglass and Dailies can help foster a culture of completion urgency. Once you start getting things more done, they will help move the entire project forward

Triage -Triage is an invaluable tool for guiding and landing a project. We can help you set that up and get you running the room like a seasoned pro  - Different prioritization models and balancing bugs against features - Who should / shouldn't be in the room? - Just need someone to stamp down the chaos?

Feedback Response - Mock reviews, usability testing, focus tests, QA reports; there are lots of sources of feedback. - Whether you have a plan and want validation, or don't even know where to start, we can help! - We can synthesize the feedback from multiple sources and help you craft or refine the best path forward from where you are

Publisher Support - We help publishers too! - Whether you just want someone to take a peek, or need to restructure from the ground up - Check out that acquisition target - Help get that game that's been stuck get to the finish line"

[source]