As you can read on my bio here, I'm the founder, partial owner, and "Somewhat-Creative Director" of The Domaginarium, an indie game development studio in El Salvador. We opened the studio in December 2010 and went through the process of shaping it and laying out the plan.

Disclaimer: Before I continue let me just say this is about sharing an experience, and not about writing a guide of "dos and don'ts" or giving you a plan on how to build your own studio in El Salvador or any other latinamerican country, in part because our plan/vision/experience is not the same as yours, and thus there's no reason why "our" plan should work on "your" company.

Ok, first a little background. El Salvador is a country that relies a lot on agriculture, and technology/entertainment related industries are somewhat left aside. There's no formal education/training on technology/entertainment areas (in other words, no game development or animation schools, filmschools or anything similar), what means there isn't a big pool of talent to choose your employees from.

While the country offers incentives to companies coming from abroad, there aren't tax breaks for game development startups, nor any other kinds of incentives and support. This means we could pretty much forget about asking the goverment for any kind of support whatsoever.

With this brief background, let's see the actual building of the studio.

When we decided to open the studio we had different tentpoles. As you know the indie games arena gives a chance to us small devs to "squeeze in," so to speak, and we would've been fool to think we could make games that could compete with whatever release from whatever big publisher, and that was the the first tentpole, making games that aren't complex to develop, yet very good and fun to play.

Making "simple" games also covered the second item: develop games using the existing resources (both technical resources and work force). We're just a handful of people so we should be able to make the games using that many people. On the technology side, we should limit ourselves to what the tools (and our knowledge of those tools) would let us do. This also meant using a proven engine instead of building our own, like other indies do. We ended up picking UDK, and I'll get back to that soon.

The whole operation had to be self-funded, and this also helped shape our choices on tools and games we could develop. No big budget titles that take years to develop, no expensive technology investments, and the goal was to have at least one game out by the end of the first year. Since this was a "new" kind of company in our country, we got emails from people asking us to become investors and such, and even if "investors" isn't a bad word, we wanted the company to rely exclusively on its own money since sometimes "investors" can become a bad word specially when you're a startup.

Even if a lot of startups like us go straight to iOS, our target platform became the PC and Mac, and mobile devices will come second.

Back to UDK. UDK offers a very good deal to indie startups where every dollar counts, specially if you live in a poor country like this. Our choices were Unity and UDK, each with a different licensing model that had to be taken into consideration not just for the short term but also long term strategy. UDK costs you next to nothing when you start developing but you have to pay royalties, which makes it more expensive in the long run, while Unity costs you $1500 per seat, plus any add-on you may wanna use, but there are no royalties involved.

While companies around the world may be very quick to acquire technologies, small companies in El Salvador just can't afford big software/hardware investments. For example, buying 5 decent workstations and 5 seats of Unity Pro was way more than we could afford.

On top of that, as I said we had to consider the whole picture. I had to talk with licensing from Epic and Unity and we ended up choosing UDK because the entire Unreal Engine licensing model fitted our short and long term strategy better, since, as I just said, the PC and Mac are just our first step.

Back to the games, even if UDK is basically the same Unreal Engine that powers a lot of AAA games like the just released Batman Arkham City, we had to be clear we were not going to develop those kinds of games, even if that meant "under-using" the engine, simply because we'd decided to make games that weren't complex to develop, and that could be developed using the available resources and under tight budgets (and that's the plan at least for our first years).

So even for a small company, we ended up making a very bold move: instead of making one game, we began producing two. One of them, SteroidS, is an arcade styled game that will see the light of day in no more than a couple of weeks. The other one, Parasite, a third person "adventure/nonshooter hybrid" that isn't exactly a "simple" game but isn't as complex as your usual AAA game, and that will be released earlier next year.

More on how we're building an indie in an unlikely place on future posts. Have a nice week!