And so, Brian and I head off on a new adventure.  <Cue Triumphant World Map Music>

On Monday, we drew up a agreement describing how our company would be structured and who would be involved, plus what our goals were, in generic terms.  We also submitted paperwork to the State of Indiana to be organized as a business entity.

On Tuesday, Indiana approved our paperwork, and we were a company!  I contacted the IRS and got an EIN number.  I setup a web hosting account, purchased our domain, added email addresses, and put the skeleton of a simple web site up.  Brian started work on a logo, based on some ideas he’d had and a conversation between the two of us.  Reminders are set for our required Tax and Business filings with the State and Federal Governments.

Today, we finished a simple website for our company, and I installed WordPress.  My goal is to blog regularly about our progress on our projects – providing updates on what we are up to and also explaining our approach and methods as we go.  We also have applied with Microsoft’s BizSpark program, a program that helps small startups by providing software and services they need while they are small.  We will hear back in about a week.

Now that the business structure is in place and moving along, we move to the next part – actually designing and building games.  Although the company started this week, the ideas and designs started almost two years ago – we’ve been iterating on them for quite some time.  We’ve had many long discussions about what works in games, what doesn’t work, what we like about those classic games that hold the most interest for us, etc.  But I’ll save that for another post.

We’ve found two books that I’m especially interested in getting my hands on:  Beginning Game Programming and Advanced 2D Game Development, both of which are written by Jonathan S. Harbour.  Both use DirectX, which is a technology I’ve really not worked with before.  I code in C# all the time, but I’ve never written this kind of code before.  These books will hopefully bootstrap my brain into thinking in the right way.