Making games is hard.  Making great games is even harder.
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While the current indie games scene is vibrant with thousands of incredibly creative and fun games being published every year, the overall environment for these games is incredibly harsh.  Being able to successfully make games has never been more difficult.
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Failure and burnout within the indie scene is a real problem few discuss.  As a community we mostly focus on the very visible success stories and don’t want to consider those that failed.  The reality of the current indie scene however is that most indie developers leave game development after only their first full release.
 
According to VG Insights, 75% of developers on Steam only ever release one game!
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The reasons for this are varied.  Projects drift, taking years of a developer’s life.  Scope creep often leads to development restarting, stalling, or completely collapsing as the project and design become untenable or the code is engineered into a dead end.  This is why many indie games never reach completion at all.  Those that do can often take too long.  It’s all too common to hear of a developer talking about a game they’ve been developing for 2, 3 or even 4 years without major progress.  This can lead to games being shipped in a shape that’s far less commercially viable than it could and should have been when initially conceived.  
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Often, the problem is not the original idea, the genre, or even the talent of the people involved.  The problem is that the project was not planned, structured, or researched enough at the beginning.  It then drifted during development due to a lack of knowledge of development strategies and techniques used in the mainstream development industry.
That is what our bootcamps are built to address.
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We want to pass on knowledge earned over decades of making games, fixing broken projects, and learning which mistakes do not need to be repeated forever.  The games industry has a knowledge-sharing problem.  Online resources are a quagmire.  Some are useful, many are shallow, almost none are interactive, and without experience it can be very difficult to tell good advice from bad.
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Industry mentors are rarely accessible to indie developers who exist outside of the circles in which these experienced people are usually found.  Our aim is to make that knowledge more accessible and focused directly on indie scale game development and the specific needs and challenges of making games on a tight timeline with limited resources.
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Our bootcamp will be built around the different stages of development, each phase structured to highlight common problems and their solutions with the resulting development work being managed by the bootcamp mentors along with one-to-one personal guidance meetings each week.  By moving through the full development process in a guided, structured way, you will learn how experienced developers think about projects as they take shape:  how they view each stage and its purpose, assess risk, control scope, solve problems, and make key decision when problems arise.
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Starting off from a carefully constructed project brief, you will take that project from concept through to a finished or near-finished result.  By the end of the bootcamp, you will have learned how to create your own production workflow that will help you make your own games more effectively, with stronger foundations, clearer decisions, healthier scope and a better chance of reaching the finish line with something you are proud of. 
 
We are not promising you will make your dream game in a month.  This course is about learning the process that helps you make your own games properly later, with stronger foundations, clearer decisions, healthier scope and a better chance of reaching the finish line with something you are proud of.
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No one can control luck, timing, algorithms or the wider market, but there is a reason some developers have earned a living at this for decades.  Long-term success is built on mastering what’s in your control:  the ability to make strong games repeatedly, in reasonable amounts of time, without destroying yourself or your team in the process.  If a game takes five painful years and fails, that can be devastating.  If you learn to shape, build, and finish projects more calmly and effectively, failure becomes something you can survive, learn from, and improve upon.
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What if there was a way to be guided through the process of developing a game, to have each step explained by an industry mentor so that you could learn how to develop games in a safer, more effective way?
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Would you like to learn how to avoid burnout, how to properly plan a project and design your game in such a way as to avoid the usual pitfalls of indie development?
We cannot remove risk from making games.
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But we can help you reduce the avoidable risks, avoid mistakes that might otherwise take years to understand, and build a process you can carry into every project that follows.
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Who this is for:
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This bootcamp is for people who are serious about making games.
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It is for indie developers, aspiring indie developers, small-team developers, and people with enough grounding in their discipline to be ready for the next stage:  learning how development works as a whole.
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You may be a programmer, artist, technical artist, audio specialist—any skill essential to the post-design process of constructing a game.  You may already have worked on games, prototypes, jams, student projects, mods, tools, or commercial projects.  What matters is that you have moved beyond simply wondering whether you want to make games, and are ready to learn how to make them with more structure, discipline, and confidence.
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This is for people who understand that making games is not easy.
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If you are drawn to independent development, you probably already know the path is uncertain.  Like any creative endeavour, it asks a lot from the people who choose it.
But that does not mean the process has to be blind.
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This bootcamp is for people who want to be armed with knowledge that might otherwise take years to acquire:  how to scope more intelligently, structure a project properly, work under constraints, communicate across disciplines, make stronger production decisions, and finish work in a way that gives it a better chance of surviving contact with the real world.
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It is for people who want to become better developers, not just better at their individual craft.
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If you already have skills, ambition, and the willingness to work seriously, this is designed to help you turn those things into a more reliable process for making games.
 
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What you’ll do:
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• Work from a clear, production-ready project brief.

• Build as part of a small team, with defined roles and expectations.

• Take a project through a structured development process from beginning to end.

• Receive direct mentoring as you work, both in your own discipline and in the wider production process.

• Learn how experienced developers think about scope, structure, communication, and completion.

• Finish with practical experience you can apply to your own future projects.

 
 
What you’ll learn:
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Whether you work in code, art, design implementation, tools, audio, or content, you will learn how to:

• Build stronger project foundations before production runs away from you.

• Understand what makes a game realistically finishable.

• Work to a brief without losing creative ownership or craft.

• Make better decisions under time and production constraints.

• Avoid common traps such as scope creep, weak communication and endless iteration.

• Create work that is shaped by real production needs.

• Repeat the process on your own projects with more confidence, clarity, and resilience.

 
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What it will cost:
 
All we ask is £750 for the full 8 weeks.
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To put this in perspective, university will land you in potentially lifelong debt with very little chance of gaining high-level industry skills.
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The other good private academies in games (and there are some great ones) charge enough for a down payment on a house.  All I can say to that in modern times is, yikes.
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We offer the knowledge you'd normally only get AFTER a big success when you'd finally win access to the kind of people who will mentor you here.
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We know times are tough, but £750 allows us to pay our bills, and we hope it's an investment enough people can make into their futures.
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This will also cost 8 weeks of your time.  Do know that this is a full-time course and you'll need to give yourself this time to focus, collaborate, work and learn.
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If this is possible for you, or even if you'd just like to reach out and learn more, please fill out the expression of interest form below, and feel free to reach out to me (Luke) on LinkedIn.