Hey, Lidoria here with the latest update on things. I know it’s been a long time since our last update. In fact our last Hotgates update was way back in March that’s almost four months of silence. Look closer though and you will see that silence didn’t mean inactivity. Here’s what we’ve been up to.
Relocation
Our relocation is finally finished and as of May Hotgates is officially an Austrian company. We’re still the same people you know and love, nothing has changed there. Why go to through all this trouble?
For starters you get a lot of benefits operating as a company and not as a sole indie developer out of your home. We can hunt for funding more efficiently now. In most cases a prerequisite for even pitching your idea is to be part of a company. As a company ne also has access to national or E.U. funding. Crowdfunding has a meaning and is much easier, thanks to becoming a more “official” entity, people trust you more. Lastly moving from a struggling economy to one of the best in the E.U, with a stable taxation system was also a logical move. There aren’t only benefits, our monthly costs have gone up significantly and we now have to spent our time between two cities Athens and Vienna. All in all though it was the best, logical thing to do.
Patreon
After a long debate we decided that our first venture into crowdfunding would be on Patreon. We don’t feel we are ready to go for an Indie Go Go or Kickstarter campaign, plus we find Patreon’s model suits our needs better. Also, it provides us with a more direct channel of communication with our fans. It’s a fairly new campaign so we will reassess as we go. For the time being its another new experience from which to learn. We know a lot of people have questions regarding crowdfunding that’s why we have been documenting our experiences with the service. Stay tuned for a post in the near future.
Hotgates.eu
Our website has undergone some changes as well.
Most notably our domain name. We switched our domain from hotgates.gr to hotgates.eu, which we felt was a necessary move. Staying on a Greek domain while being an Austrian company would only confuse our community. We also added a security certification to our site so you can browse its contents safer.
Our new contact information was also added to reflect our relocation.
We added a Backers Hall of Fame for all of the people supporting us through Patreon or Paypal. Thank you for your continued support.
A new page called Useful Links was added. This page contains links to free tools, assets, tutorials, software that you can use as a game developer. All of the links have been tested and used by us so you can feel safe using them We will be updating this list every few weeks as we find more exciting stuff.
The whole site underwent a complete overhaul. The SEO was improved, a lot of text was reformatted to be more easy to read, especially our tutorials. The size of a lot of images was reduced to provide you with a better and faster experience. We also changed the styling to make it more pleasing to the eyes. Comments were enabled where necessary. There are still some surprises down the road so stay tuned.
We decided to keep our news posts to a minimum, once every two months. We’d rather bring you news about the game and only if something important happens at Hotgates wright a news post about it. You can always follow us on social media for day to day news though.
Social media
Hotgates has also an active presence on most social media now as well as other sites. You can find us on facebook, Google +, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Artstation, Sketchfab, CG Cookie, Patreon. Some are more active than others but we are doing our best to balance things out.
Tutorials
Tutorials will be released once per month due to lack of time. We apologize and we are doing our best to remedy the situation, hence our Patreon campaign. If all goes well and we reach our goals there will be tutorials released every two weeks or more plus we’ll start creating video tutorials as well. On the upside we will pick up the pace and move into more advanced concepts sooner rather then later. I don’t want to announce anything yet but we are still working on the content moving forward.
Projects
Project Origins is still under development, that hasn’t changed but our focus has shifted a bit. We are working on two Unreal Marketplace asset packs, that’s our main focus right now. Crowdfunding is well and all but until it reaches its goals we have to keep business sustainability as our first priority. Creating a smaller game was also put on the table, but we decided against it, as it would mean shifting our focus 100% away from Project Origins. We prefer to stay focused one project, unless it’s a fun idea and one that can be implemented in a short period of time. In other words, we never say never.
What comes next?
Now, we work until the end of August to meet all our deadlines for this time period. In August we will take a much needed brake and go on some vacation to fill our batteries and regroup. Come September we will set our goals for the rest of 2017 and start working on them.
Everything you read here and everything done at Hotgates is achieved by two people with a full time job on their backs, so if some things move slower than others, please be patient. If you want to help us out then please stop by our Patreon page and show your support. Thank you. Till next time, hugs and kisses.
