Jeff Hangartner – Revealing the Path Less Travelled in Video Game Industry

Jeff HangartnerJeff Hangartner, the founder of the gaming start-up, Bulletproof Outlaws has been a professional developer of games over the last half a decade. Creator of Pixelation, the 1st Pixel Art Forum and also originator of the Pixel tutorials which have been published in the form of a book. Jeff has always been a pioneer of the gaming industry.

CG Today is proud to present Jeff’s exploration as he shares the whole process of creating a start-up right from day 1. With the belief that gaming development is coming back to its original “one programmer in the basement roots” idea, Bulletproof Outlaws is chronicling every step of its start-up process from strategies, to marketing, setting goals and outsourcing, successes and failures. The aim is to help other developers who have ideas but are intimidated by the whole start-up process and are not sure how to go about it.

You can visit his website Bulletproof Outlaws to know more about him or send an email to get connected.

Today was my business class and we watched a DVD lecture of John DeMartini. It mostly covered psychological stuff. The guy is pretty charismatic, and the points he was making about focusing on what you want to do were good ideas. One of the exercises he suggested is to write down the tasks you do daily, in order of which ones you like doing the most to which ones you dread doing, for a long period of time, and down the road when you look back at these tasks you’ll notice a trend in your top 2 or 3 things… those are the things you should find a way to do something with in your life, because those are the things that are important to you and bring you joy.

I like playing videogames, I like drawing, and I like writing. So the goal I’m working towards is to find a way to make money drawing in the videogame industry, and writing about it. Makes perfect sense! I’m lucky, I’ve known what I wanted to do since I was a little kid, but a lot of other people aren’t so fortunate and don’t really have an obvious direction for their life. I’d be curious to see if this experiment helped people in that situation!

Another thing he suggested with regards to knowing when it’s time to hire staff, was to take the top 3 – 5 things on that list that you like doing, and then look at your routine tasks that are below those ones on the list. When the amount of time those tasks take up is more than an hour and you can find a way to outsource those things for less money than you would make if you spent that hour focusing on the important things at the top of the list, it’s time to hire staff to do them.

I like both of these things, but right now my task list is pretty random because I’m juggling so many hats, and I don’t have the money to hire more people, but down the road after a few games this kind of thinking should help!

I also like that he said something like: “I travel a lot, and I love doing it. So to me, the world is my home. Every country is just another room in my house…I just fly from room to room instead of walk. Other people have homes too, they’re just smaller than mine.” I’d like to travel down the road, working off my laptop, so I like that mindset haha

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Bulletproof Outlaws Diary