Greetings

Hello and welcome to the Dust Productions blog.  My name is Dusty, and my first game credit was on a Flash game over 15 years ago (you know, when that was a cool thing to do).  Most recently I decided to focus on building my own company, and left a good position in the simulation industry to do so.  And so here we are.

One of the purposes of these posts is to talk about developing games / apps / websites / whatever I'm working on at the time.  I also plan to talk about the less "cool" business side of things, such as how I budget, how I got to this point, what the my goals and vision are, how I plan to get there, how I do compared to my goals, and how I handle failure.  My hope is to be as transparent as possible about how I'm running my company so others can learn from my successes and failures.

Ultimately, I want to have a company that isn't solely motivated by profits and can do things that other companies are hesitant to do because they are constantly chasing the bottom line.  For example, I want my the people who work for this company to feel ownership over their work.  Many creative companies treat their employees like cogs in a machine.  I want people to know that I trust them to make the decisions they were hired to make, and work on the things that matter the most.

Oftentimes managers think the things that matter most are adding new features, churning out mediocre quality products for the sake of profit, and ignoring the plights of the developers because the customer is what matters most.  I fundamentally disagree with these things.  The developers are the lifeblood of the company.  Developers need tools and resources so they can spend less time focusing on the boring and non-creative work, and more time making awesome stuff!

So what does this mean?  This means I want a significant portion of what the company works on to be things the developers themselves thing we should do.  I consider myself to be a strong decision maker, I have been in charge of products worth millions of dollars, and I have hundreds of ideas for things I want to do, so I could just spew orders at people with the justification that I'm the "visionary", but I want to empower the people who choose to spend a significant portion of their time with this company every day to own, and I mean really OWN the work they do.

I'll touch more on all this stuff in later posts, but these are the sorts of things I intend to do differently.  Talk to you again soon.