Garden of Dreams Studio founded on January 1, 2019, Moscow. We had no team, no investments, no experience in the industry. There were only two of us: Mikhail Ponyakshin and I, Evgeny Grishakov. The plans were ambitious. But we wanted to start small and step by step increase the scale of the games, the scale of business.
Key difference
Our key difference from other studios is openness. Since January 1, we started to create our video blog “365 Game Dev Blog” in English and Russian. We show the game development process, we share our thoughts on the game dev, and most importantly — we open our earnings and all the statistics of games. Why not?
Openness does not allow us to work “carelessly”, we have no option to create rubbish or not to create at all. Did a bad game come out? Get the bad results. And as we have already said, we don’t have much experience in game dev, so we sincerely count on the help of our subscribers. If you know what we need to improve our activities — do not hesitate to write to us.
Furthermore, in addition to the blog, we also have this corporate platform: godreams.games. This is a great platform where we also post articles about game development and ask visitors to vote for their favorite art or game design solution. Here we are looking for testers for new games and we always ready to communicate with the audience.
No budget at the start
When we started, we didn’t have a development budget. I am not a programmer or an artist. Misha is a game designer, but with little experience. So we realized that it’s just impossible to make a game by yourself, and we simply don’t have the money to support the team. So we decide to invite the programmers not as the employees, but as partners.
We posted offer on the forums that we are looking for programmers who want to make the game of their dreams. We considered only games with prototypes and received approximately 20 applications. Of these, we agreed to cooperate with 5 developers. So from the end of January and beginning of February, we took into the development of 5 full-fledged projects for mobile platforms: 3 runners + 1 logical strategy + 1 roguelike game.
Today our first game Slide is already finished and you can download it. And other games will be finished soon.
But that is not all. Since we are also leading YouTube, we are in the blogger community. There we met a lot of interesting people, but the main thing — we meet our new partners too. They are the bloggers who created the fastest growing children’s YouTube channel in the world. They scored more than 500 thousand subscribers in a month and continue to grow (check how many subscribers they have now).
So we started to develop one more game. Now I don’t want to tell all the details. Just rejoice for us: we are doing what we love, doing several projects at once and want to please people with interesting games.
Results and links
To be honest, our financial results are disappointing: in the first 3 months, we earned only $100. But we have ambitious plans for the second quarter of 2019, stay tuned.
If you have questions, write in comments or on my personal mail: grishakof@gmail.com
And do not forget to subscribe to our social networks:
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/365gamedevblog
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GardenOfDreamsGames/
This story will be updated from time to time.
Cheers, guys.
