From the two teams we had formed for Dare, we picked 3 people to join our company (1 2d/3d artist, 1 3d modeller and animator and 1 programmer) and made them directors. There were mainly 2 reasons for this: we thought that by making them Directors they would (1) appreciate that they were working for themselves as it was their company and that (2)they would be loyal to the company for a few years (ie work damn hard and not just up and left if they had a better offer of a job come along).

Now that we had formed ourselves into a good robust team, as co-founders, my husband and I set about getting funding for our first venture - no easy task!.

We pitched at a Connect Conference in 2003 with our mass-multiplayer online idea and, although we received great interest and enthusiasm for it, we were unsuccessful in obtaining the massive amount of equity we needed to start things moving. We had a good idea beforehand anyway that there was unlikely to be anyone there who would give us the then 500,000k we were looking for due to the fact we had no previous work published or indeed, any experience in running a company, nevertheless, the Connect experience itself was a brilliant introduction to the very scary world of pitching in front of a packed room of investors. Although we gained no investment, we did gain an appreciation of our idea, our foresightedness of the fixed and wireless online gaming markets from industry experts and, more importantly, a few contacts in the industry that we have since used and can use in the future.

After the Connect conference, undeterred, we continued looking around for more funding opportunities and happened upon a new software 'incubator' company setting up who were looking for companies (not just game-related) to be facilitated at their offices, whereby, they would help with finding funding opportunities from their network of investors and give the required support to the business side of things. Having been accepted into the incubator and given some initial funding, we continued to work on our mmog idea. After a few months though, we realised that it was just too big a first project to do as our first game so, after noticing the upsurge of mobile gaming and getting familiar with the mobile market, we changed our business direction towards it.

At this point in time, we realised that the skills we had were not initially suited to mobile gaming - we had a 1st class honours programmer who was now required to learn J2me and a 3d modeller who had to forego most of those skills in order to get to grips with the mighty pixel graphics! and, although they weren't entirely happy at first, they understood the company had to go in this direction in order to feasibly get a game out as quickly as possible.

So... the learning began and, while this was going on, we relocated our offices to Dundee as the Scottish Executive were attracting new start-ups into the city with the lure of grant aid and hinting at the myriad of funding packages that would be available to qualified companies in the future...yeah!....all seemed well and bright in dowdy Dundee...or was it?....

Next time - getting to grips with our first mobile game...