Just back from a meeting with the lawyers.

Actually it went very well, but I've done a lot of preparation in terms of the contracts for dealing with my team, how the business will operate (especially with regards to the profit share scheme which complicates book-keeping) and how we intend to leverage what we produce in order to make money.

The lawyers themselves also recommended EM media to me, and have done a lot of work with them in the past which should grease some wheels as far as an application for a grant from them is concerned. Good news!

So the plan now is to wait for a quote for drawing up the relevant contracts and take that along to EM Media as proof of what the company's all about (as soon as the registration comes back), and as an example of what we'd like assistance with.

Briefly, the contracts we need (to operate the company as described in my help wanted thread) are:

1) Asset submission agreement / royalty agreement

2) Consultancy agreement / freelance development agreement / profit share specification.

3) NDA (included in the above agreements to some extent.

4) Per-product and per-studio License agreements for the library.

5) Customer EULA for the retail assets prohibiting resale, but allowing inclusion in any form of game product, and preserving company ownership of the IP.

6) EULA for the tools suite.

EDIT:

7) EULA for Bloodspear / any other game we produce. This is a 'do it later' thing - the preceding documents are more important at present, especially considering the limited capital I have available.

Clauses that are important, other than the obvious what work for what pay are things like the protection of the right to be identified as the author of work, non-solicitation (don't poach our customers), non-competition (don't compete with us) with a cut off time.

Also, a fun fact - even for freelance consultancy it is a UK requirement that some provisio be made for holiday pay IN ADDITION to the set salary (I wish I knew that last time I did a lot of work for a client in my self-employed role). This boils down to my core team members effectively getting a statutory rate on top of the salary they would otherwise be paid. (Which is used to determine profit share and therefore falls through to what they actually get before the company can afford the full rate).

All good fun. I hate wearing a suit and doing this sort of thing. Back to coding and trying to recruit an art director. :-)