Preparing a business plan for a game on Steam

When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.

At the end of this post, we will have:

• A brief strategy of our company: what we do, how, and why.
• A table with our beacons — successful games roughly similar to what we want to make. Similar in gameplay, team size, budget, etc.
• A composition of the team we need to assemble.
• A roadmap — a development plan for our game.
• An outline of our marketing strategy.
• A financial model — how much we will spend, how much we will earn.
• A large number of my caveats throughout the post.
• Jokes and I hope witty remarks.

All the final documents can be found here.

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Computational mechanics & ε- (epsilon) machines

I found a few new concepts for tracking.

Computational mechanics

There is computational mechanics, which deals with numerical modeling of mechanical processes and there is an article about it on the wiki. This post is not about it.

This post is about computational mechanics, which studies abstractions of complex processes: how emergent behavior arises from the sum of the behavior / statistics of low-level processes. For example, why the Big Red Spot on Jupiter is stable, or why the result of a processor calculations does not depend on the properties of each electron in it.

ε- (epsilon) machine

The concept of a device that can exist in a finite set of states and can predict its future state (or state distribution?) based on the current one.

Computational mechanics allows (or should allow) to represent complex systems as a hierarchy of ε-machines. This creates a formal language for describing complex systems and emergent behavior.

For example, our brain can be represented as an ε-machine. Formally, the state of the brain never repeats (voltages on neurons, positions of neurotransmitter molecules, etc), but there are a huge number of situations when we do the same thing in the same conditions.

Here is a popular science explanation: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-scale-order-emerges-20240610/

P.S. I will try to dig into scientific articles. I will tell you if I find something interesting and practical. P.P.S. I have long been thinking in the direction of a similar thing. Unfortunately, the twists of life do not allow me to seriously dig into science and mathematics. I am always happy when I encounter the results of other people's digging.