Arkode
Arkode was a two-person games studio I co-founded with Joshua Matthews in our second year at Sheffield Hallam University, on the university’s funded Enterprise placement scheme. It ran from 2019 into 2021.
We started intending to make small mobile games in Unity, but losing a third team-member forced us to narrow down to a single project: “Reign of Rains”, a top-down voxel inspired survival RPG. We later moved to Unreal 4 for performance reasons. Matthews did design work, while I worked on C++ systems design, the IsoEngine editor, and business administration.
While the project and brand were a commercial failure, I learnt a lot about business, game production, systems design, and brand development, all of which I am extremely grateful for.
The following articles are reproduced as written between December 2019 and May 2021. I’ve grown a lot as a person since then, and I think some of the articles have aged better than others. Rather than smooth over my past, I want to keep the following snapshots of my life as a 20 year old, building a business and public identity for the first time.
IsoEngine
Building Arkode Games
What building it taught me
Moving to Jira and Kaban for our project management3 March 2020At the highest level, Kanban is a methodology by which to organise and develop projects, but before I go into too much detail on the subject, I just want to say that I am very new to kanban as a concept.
Operating at your best as an entrepreneur4 February 2020Being an entrepreneur is tough. Even the word entrepreneur itself evokes an image in my head of someone who’s always busy, is fueled by coffee and barely has a social life.
Value based social media marketing for start-ups22 January 2020It’s no secret that social media marketing can at times be a difficult venture.
Skill development for new businesses3 December 2019I’m sure anyone reading this is under no illusion that creating a business is easy.
Productivity
Productivity while working from home27 April 2020As many of us are facing the prospect of working from home, I thought I’d write briefly about my experience with it.
Making a productivity planner29 January 2020I said some time ago that I was going to make this blog post, explaining in more depth something that I started doing a few months ago.