Polygonal Mind, almost a year of development.

Hello there, for those who doesn't know me my name is A. Daniel García Aranda and I'm one of the co-founders of Polygonal Mind, and now it's sole owner.

This is meant to be the first blog post and  I'm going to talk you about the company journey from day -1 to the present day, what drove us to start a business and why we made the decisions we made on the go.

Day -1

Last year my friend Jesus and I were working at Imascono, a Spanish augmented reality start-up, we both liked our job there, but we always loved video games and we both felt AR wasn't that fulfilling anymore.
On our daily work breaks and the time we spent playing video games together we spoke a lot about making our own project, until it finally happened, we started our own project on our free time.
Since the start we were really passionate about it, we couldn't wait to finish our morning jobs and come back home to work on our personal project, this obliviously had consequences, we started to show less and less interest on our AR jobs and everyone at the office saw it except us.
Some weeks later Jesus contract with Imascono ended.
And a couple of weeks later in March of 2015 I was fired.

The waking up months.

Both being out of our morning duties Jesus and I spent our new free time on "Project Grape", the new cool lowpoly endless leaper inspired by two of our favourite games, Crossy Roads and Burrito Bison.
Since Hipster Whale took a few weeks to develop we thought "hey if they did in 6 weeks we can do it in 18 weeks, I'm a character artist and you are a game designer, we CAN do it".
Oh boy we were wrong, 
Our game had more than 50 characters, all with their own animations, various scenarios and more stuff that came out on the way, so following months we just worked on the things​ we needed for the game, and by work I mean learn, we discovered that we were lacking of some skills needed, so we just put our hours into improving them without thinking on the consequences of the project measure.

Both of us have programming background and both of us don't really enjoy to code that much, but since Jesus had more experience than I did he took the coder role and I took the artistic side of the project.

Meanwhile we did our research about how to create a company outside Spain and I must say, if there is something we did right from the beginning, this is it. Maybe in the future I write about why we made this choice.
On August we procrastinated a lot and from this month forward Just Leaping was starting to become a car stuck in the sand, the problem was that we were in the middle of the desert and we didn't even noticed.

​Finally on October of  2015 Polygonal Mind was founded.
​

The desert

We almost had a beta, things were going smoothly on my side, I had already made the characters and animated them.
The bad months of not seeing any progress were behind me and I was confident with my new set of skills.
On the other hand the gameplay was not doing that good, we were doing a wide screen game and nor the speed or the flow of the game felt good to us, or to anyone who played it, this was a really though situation for Jesus, he wasn't feeling confident about his coding skills anymore and the pile of problems kept growing. every day.
So we both meet to find out a solution to this, and we ended up changing the game mechanics to fit a vertical screen, note that this was a change we made after 9 months of development.
​This change made the game fun, at least, it gave us new fresh ideas and changed our perspective to the project, but it was too late, we were deeply stuck in the sand.
We both were lacking as a team, we started to talk, less and less, we did not meet any of our own deadlines, we were tired as f*ck of this project but we were too proud to let it go and start another one.
On top of that, we had to make a trip to London to open a bank account and start running the business once for all, but we kept postponing it. ​

2016 started and we did an annual review about the business and the game and what once it was all positivism and confidence, it was all gone, I think we both knew at that point that the project was not going to make it to the stores anytime soon, but after some talking we promised ourselves that we were going to release the game and that we did learn A LOT through 2015 and the final price was worth it.

I was quite motivated myself since I was moving to London with my girlfriend for at least 3 months on March 17th, I wanted assist some events to do networking and making things actually happen, so I had the idea of looking for a publisher to help us finish our game and make some bucks. I spoke with Jesus about it, but he didn't liked the idea that much, he reminded me that we agreed on doing it all by ourselves from the beginning. Also bringing in a publisher would add more months of work to Just Leaping and that was something we didn't liked at all. This conversation was a break point for us, on one side I wanted to make profit with our almost a year of development, on the other side, Jesus didn't care about that stuff anymore, he was really tired about the project, he just wanted it to finish, codding was never his favourite skill and he was getting really sick of it. This made him re-think about everything we were actually doing and if that was his actual goal after 11 months of development.

A couple of weeks later Jesus told me he wanted out, out of the project and out of the company we both created. After talking about it I understood that coding was really stressing him and that his life goals changed over the course of the year, although we both wanted to finish the project we started, we could not do it together as a team, we both agreed that we needed to go separated ways.

He was burned out and I cannot blame him since I was feeling the same thing.

Pivot

I packed all up and moved to London with my girlfriend Cassandra.
My workstation arrived with a surprise, the graphic card was broken.
So there I was in a foreign country with no computer to work and no stable internet, so I decided to find a job as a 3D artist, sent some resumes and went to a couple of networking events, but no luck, I was unable to make a good portfolio with my desktop broken up.

​A couple of weeks later Cassandra and I moved to a new home, I was feeling really bad at the time and ended up asking my landlord how could I find a job in London. He recommended me a book that helped him in the past "Get What You Deserve: How to Guerrilla Market Yourself" so I bought it along with Never Get a "real Job".

After reading this books in a couple of days I decided to start take action, so I bought a cheaper Graphic card on amazon and started to make 3D the next day. I understood that I can't do video games on my own and I don't want to work for another company but mine. That's why Polygonal Mind needed to pivot in another direction that could fit my skills, a 3D design studio.

Why did I took this decision? Well, one of the reasons of starting Polygonal Mind was to make the products that we could be proud of saying that are ours, we deeply believed that we could do better on our own than for working for others ad by doing so we were going to learn way more. Somehow we both lost our path to this great idea we had the day -1, and it took me months to see the way back to it, now my real goal is to keep this ideals alive every day, no matter what .

After this huge step back to my mental canvas, I started to make more changes on the company, I made this website and started to network with more confidence .

Three weeks later I started to have some clients and started to work on Morphite with Crescent Moon Games and We're Five Games.

So what's going on now?

Now, I'm cleaning up minor projects to be able to start sharing more about my artwork and my path to become the best 3D company around, it's gonna be one hell of a ride :)
Jesus now is improving his 3D modelling skills, and he never typed a line of code since May.
As for Just leaping, the game development is stopped, we haven't work anymore on it, but as for the characters I have a couple of cool projects on my mind, but I still can't say anything about it.

Also I wanna thank you for reading my history, it took me forever to write this post, due it's sentimental value.
I know it's a long read and I had to cut some of the content to not make it a super large post, so if there is anything you would like to ask, feel free to do it and I will be glad to answer :)