Dissolution of Sprixelsoft Studio Limited

You may have noticed that after a seemingly optimistic start to the year where we announced that we were looking to take 2014 by the horns that there was a sudden drop-off of updates. I’ve never been the best at cushioning bad news, so lets cut straight to the meat of it: Sprixelsoft Studio Limited is no longer a corporation. As of March 20, 2014 07:41 PM Pacific Time (that’s right boys and girls… as an official legal entity Sprixelsoft lasted less than one full year) we have filed our application for voluntary dissolution with BC Registry Services.

Where Did We Go Wrong

Maybe we went wrong by incorporating in the first place. After our first working prototype last year, we were so caught up with the idea of being able to present at PAX… that this would mean that we’d need to pay fees, that we’d need an entity that holds our intellectual properties, that we’d have our game ready for sale in no time and need to have a bank account… we got very caught up in thinking about the future and decided that incorporating would be a smart thing to do. In a way it was… we both learned a lot about conducting business in the process, but it also ate up a lot of our time drafting legal documents and filing paperwork. Time that should have spent further developing our prototype went into bureaucracy. The whole point of going indy was to be quick, nimble, and to make a game. We did none of those things.

We had been very starry eyed when working on this project and wanted to do everything from scratch. The game was built from the ground up in Visual Studio using C++ rather than in something like Game Maker, or Unity. It was overambitious, but we worked hard in the time we had. As mentioned above, once our prototype was done there was a big change in our productivity. We worked hard and got a prototype done in a short period of time; but then after shifting to and from the incorporation process we decided to make significant changes (architecturally/design) wise which meant that Matt’s spare time went to reinventing the work that we had already as opposed to pushing forward.

Maintaining full fledged indie development while working a full time job is very difficult. Matt’s available time dwindled, and I spent my time not being productive as I didn’t want to try and step on his toes by tinkering with code myself. Some bugs popped up, grinding development to a halt. Eventually though some new opportunities began to emerge and Matt found himself dealing with job offers. I myself, grew weary of having so much time to myself and began looking for work. We’ve now both found ourselves with new jobs and are uncertain when exactly things will settle down and we’ll find ourselves working on Super Hematoma again.

Doing Business

At the moment we’ve got no product to sell. Sprixelsoft Studio Limited has had no source of income at all… so neither of us have technically been employees at Sprixelsoft as there were no employment contracts drafted and no way to receive a salary. We were both share holders and directors, but for all intents and purposes Sprixelsoft has served as shell company which held onto our intellectual properties while we worked.

As you may be aware (or guessed from the leading image which indicates places we have or are about to live) Matt and I are mild globe trotters. Between the two of us we’ve lived in 5 countries and moved over 20 times to date. We both grew up in Nova Scotia together, and then synced back up in Vancouver which led to us starting this whole endeavour together. Matt is going to be starting work in the United States in the very near future. I’ve got a short project that will see me in the UK for a few months before I head (most likely) to the United States. Unfortunately, neither of us are US citizens.

As long as our feet are planted on US soil… neither of us have the privilege of conducting business except for whomever gives us the proper paperwork to do so. We’ve looked into it, and at this point, we’re not able to sponsor ourselves to work here. So even if our productivity was through the roof, we’d have ourselves a little bit of an awkward situation where neither of us are capable of doing anything meaningful with the corporation. Maintaining would mean that we’ll be filing annual reports and taxes which further detracts from how we are able to spend our time…. and to what end? From the angles we’ve been looking at it… continuing to hold onto Sprixelsoft Studio Limited has seemed like more trouble than it’s worth.

What Now

We’re both still on very good terms with each other. This dissolution was not because we couldn’t stand each other, but because the system isn’t designed with us in mind.

Believe it or not, we’ve come up with ideas we haven’t shown you. We’ve decided to split our various properties up amongst the two of us in a way that we’re both satisfied with. For the next couple of months, we might not see any progress happen while we settle into our new lives. After that, we hope to once again return to tinkering away at our ideas as a hobby. We’ve both discussed wanting to port the game over to Unity and will likely try to make that happen together. I think we’ve come too far for Super Hematoma to vanish. At the very least some day we want a kick ass demo that we can play with you.

I want to make it clear however, that Super Hematoma is a hobby for the foreseeable future. While we don’t want to let this thing die… we also don’t have any hard deadlines. We’ll make updates when we have them, and will continue to run sprixelsoft.com as a blog and dev record. While I had tried to maintain a regular posting schedule over the past year, I don’t think that this is what you should expect going forward. Hopefully updates will be meaningful if not frequent.