Image Source: Falmouth university Online Canvass
For this week’s spark forum, we would love to hear your thoughts and feelings about creating a personal brand.
Have you made any steps towards creating a personal brand? The idea comes naturally to some, and to others, the very thought of building a personal brand can make them cringe. If you can get beyond the marketing hype and buzz words, a lot of the time the personal brand is more about reputations and getting yourself out there.
Please share your thoughts as individuals in the forum, summarising your answer to the above question in a short paragraph. This is also a great opportunity to share any resources you already have, such as portfolio websites, social networking accounts, style guides, CVs or anything else you think is relevant.
For the past year and a half I have been building up my own brand under the name TBF Games (Trial by Fire Games) based off of the old saying "Trial by Fire", where the difficulty of older generation games would take its toll on people mentally & physically. Whilst I do not make hard games, given my age I like to refer back to these sorts of things and also have a story behind the name. I started off with my itchio game page which can be found here https://aaron-wise.itch.io/ I slowly developed a small portfolio of games for my own brand & also made collaborations with other studios before joining Vidas Games which can be found here
Through my own games & via collaboration I had numerous online social media personalities that got me quite a bit of exposure. The likes of Jack Septiceye, John Wolfe, Pewdiepie & Markiplier to name a few. With this new found exposure I was able to sustain a living off of the sales of my games and also partner with an indie publisher Dread XP. From Dread XP I decided to take an alternative form of contract with them. Instead of taking $2500 upfront for 2-3 weeks work, I would take 10% of sales quarterly with an additional 5% being rewarded in terms of sales bonuses. The games are available on Steam & also got me wider recognition since I now worked directly with Airdorf who created the very popular "Faith" game and David Syzmanski who created "Dusk", "Ultrakill" and the ever-popular "Amid Evil". Based on the success of The Dread X collection games and the continually bi-monthly releases of my games & growing social media presence, I now have a successful Patreon where I earn a decent chunk of revenue, a monthly sales incoming from Steam for my individual game, and the quarterly income from the Dread XP publisher along with Gamejolt page sales and my newly released merchandise store. All in all, it's hard work but it allowed me to quit my job & do this full time. If anyone wants to follow me you check out my twitter and other socials below. In summary, the best piece of advice I can give anyone looking to do this is, make friends, collaborate, participate, Game-jams, everything you can think of. If you have the time, go for it. It all pays off in the end, and don't sell yourself short. I know I look like I only make horror games, but I also make meme games too.
This week I also watched the Real Works employability service video to see what jobs they had available. As mentioned above, it provides a good income allowing me to stay and work from home, but now and then I like to take on projects or look for contract work to give myself a cash injection.
Looking on the employability website I found 3 jobs that met my requirements along with my level of study.
This week the online team have suggested that we complete "The art of the approach" however I had completed this in the previous week given the content lock that was put in place for the game we had made, freeing me up to spend more time on written work.
I have included the screenshot again to show completion of this.
Image Source - Falmouth Online university Canvass
THE FINAL RETROSPECTIVE:
Looking back at all that we have done so far on this module, I really liked covering all of the content in Real Works which helped me identify pitching tips and areas in which I need improvement from. I liked doing our practice pitch in week 6 as that gave me a real world experience in front of a series of multi-talented people in industry.
Helping edit the trailer and the 10 minute pitch was also very rewarding. I love video editing as I do it for a separate YouTube channel. It was good seeing all of progress we had done edited all together and presented in a pitch and a trailer. Looking back at us as a team, I think we have grown a lot and there is some definite new friendships to be had. We all learned a lot from each other and working on this all the way up until submission day was a team effort. We all pulled through in the end and I am pleased with how it came out. Looking back at myself, I entered this team with a strong knowledge on UE4 I would say, but in certain areas. I have mentioned before how I usually make horror games but this was a real test for me. Adding mechanics to the game I don't normally research and look into, gaining a deeper understanding of certain workings of Unreal and even adding accessibility options into the game. I am most proud of the colour blind settings that allow people with sight issues to play the game comfortably, along with the rumble feature also. I feel that the team and I have stuck to the marking rubric well and delivered on all aspects of the brief.
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