Why I Started a Game Studio

In February of 2023 I was working on a game. I knew that if I wanted it to have any success I would have to get my name out there, so I wanted to formalize what I was doing by forming a Studio. Big Boat was a name that I had been kicking around for a couple of years, so I went through the process and formed an LLC in South Carolina.

Why Big Boat?

Honestly there isn’t much to it, I like boats, I like alliterations, and in my opinion it is simple and catchy. It doesn’t at all represent a genre or type of game that I want to make, it is just a name I like. Plus I thought it was pretty funny to have a company called Big Boat with a logo that is a small boat…

Why did I build a Site?

I won’t lie, I focused a bit too hard on this website before it was necessary. Right after I officially formed my company, I found out that I would potentially have some higher ups at a big studio looking up me and my company from a previous project that I worked on. I rushed to get a placeholder out with some basic information so that I could at least look real. This was a site that I made in just html and css with a placeholder logo.

So Why did I keep building it?

The main reason is I tend to hyper fixate on things… But also it made sense at the time. My wife was due to have our second child in just a few months, so I knew that I would not have a ton of development time in general after our baby was born. So I decided to try to tackle this (what I thought) small project in that time, then move back to the game when I got back to a normal routine.

What Technology Did I Use?

Originally, I used nothing. All I knew was html, css and vanilla js. The only real website I had made before this was Smixed, which I was able to accomplish with no real technologies. But I was not opposed to learning something new. I did not need a fancy site, I knew I could do everything I wanted with basic html, css and js, but I knew that would become a hassle to manage once I got to the point of implementing a blog. I decided to make a post on reddit in r/webdev. I asked if anyone knew what would be a good technology for what I am trying to do, I had no need for anything like angular or react but wanted something to make this process smoother. That is when I learned about Astro.

Astro

I absolutely love Astro. For those who don’t know its a Static Site Generator. It allows you to do a lot of handy things like create templates and components to easily build out pages without constantly copying and pasting elements that you want to be repeated. It has a lot of other cool features which all work together to build a fast and and simple site without a bunch of javascript shipped to the browser.

The Learning Curve

I thought that astro was super easy to learn. I started with Astro right after 2.0 was released and they had a great getting started guide on their Documentation Page. After I ported my current site over to Astro, I decided to look up some tutorials to learn a bit more. I felt confident that I could do what I wanted to with Astro at the time, but I knew that Astro had capabilities that I did not even know about, and that was a great way to find them. I really liked the videos by Coding in Public particularly 3.5 Hour Course. This was extremely helpful for me to not only learn the best practices for using Astro, but also with giving me ideas of things to add or tweak with my own site. I can’t recommend it enough.

The Support

Another huge thing to mention with Astro is the incredible community. There were a few times that I ran into a couple things that didn’t make sense or functionality that wasn’t covered well in the docs. But I found that there is an Astro Community Discord that is FULL of people who are willing to answer any question that you have.

How long did it take?

It took a while… My first git commit after I implemented Astro was on May 10th and it is currently September 10th and I am just at the point now where I consider the site “done”. The main reason it took a while is because my daughter was born. She ended up being born about 2 weeks early, so after that, development came to a standstill. I don’t think I even touched my computer for the first month, then after that it was just work on it for an hour or two a week. I am just now in September getting to the point of having a normal routine to work, but I am a stay at home dad so even on the best weeks I only get about 10 hours in a week to put towards development time. So it takes a while…

What Mistakes did I make?

I made a bunch of mistakes, mostly leaning back into hyperfixating on things that don’t matter. I would spend a week trying to overcome this complicated problem I made up only to then realize what I was doing was not necessary for the site or that the simple answer was best. With CSS I would often spend a ton of time trying to tweak my units to scale naturally with the browser window when in reality it was a lot quicker to put in one or two media queries.

Will I use Asto Again?

Absolutely. I don’t have any plans in the immediate future to do any web-dev outside of maintaining this site, but I will be using Astro for any other site I end up making. Once my game gets a little further along, I will likely be making it’s site using Astro.