As our lease is set to expire in a few short months, and as I am starting to scout for a new home for us, I thought it might be interesting or even entertaining to muse and reminisce on the history of our migration through New York City as an indie dev team.
We started this journey in a room of a shared space that we subleased. The building was located at the edge of Chinatown, and it was a converted warehouse that stood for almost a hundred years, which is quite common in the NYC. The room was one of three on the floor, and the floor shared a common area a bathroom, and a kitchenette. Our neighbors were a small architect firm and a fashion photography agency. Our room had no windows, and the sunlight came in from the lone window of the common space on the opposite end. While grimy, old, and essentially doorless, our room did have white lights and a hardwood floor, and it was cozy and artsy in a grungy sort of way. And aside from reasonable rent, the other great benefit was the abundance of cheap and good food options in Chinatown.
In our room, we’ve experienced some great highs. We got a regular monthly game night off the ground, and it was fun night for indie devs, artists, and sometimes devs from bigger studios to get together. Friends met there and became partners in game development and in life. We also had ourbrushes with celebrity fame, as our landlord was none other than Sia Furler. She was one mellow and nice landlord and an even better person. Her puppy roaming the floor was a regular phenomenon. We also (literally) bumped into Eminem in the elevator a few times as he rode it to his recording studio upstairs. Kotaku visited us there, and we released our first game on Steam – Flight of the Icarus – there. We saw a few sunrises completing CreaVures there, and Guns of Icarus started there.
And we experienced some really low points in that room as well. The work on Guns of Icarus commenced with a tumultuous relationship with a publisher that put us on the precipice of financial ruins. Nearly six months of toil, long days and nights, and anxiety, we as a group were emotionally and physically spent during the publisher relationship. We were burnt out before the project even got too far off the ground, and when it came crashing back down with a thud, we had to pick up the pieces and find the will and energy to start over.
One night, someone from the adjoining building decided to toss a still lit cigaret down the trash chute. The garbage in the chute caught fire, and the fire climbed up the shoot and burnt through our wall. There was a faulty construction spot in our wall where a window used to be. Instead of being sealed by bricks, it was patched over with sheetrock. The fire burnt through the sheetrock and into our room. Luckily no one was there that night, but unfortunately the combine forces of the fire and the deluge of water from the sprinklers flooded our space and chewed up just about everything in it, from computers to furniture and our personal belongings. We were displaced for weeks, and our insurance, citing some obscure fine print, refused to pay. We didn’t get reimbursed by insurance for almost 3 months. When we finally returned, a little bit of something has changed. That vibe and energy of the room had withered away.
The last straw to move came from one of our neighbors. While the idea of having a common area and a kitchenette shared between all the tenants seemed reasonable, in reality, the fashion photography agency monopolized the spaces. Others rarely got to use them, and the agency’s dishes filled the pantries. We, along with the architects, were harassed about any number of things. So as our lease there approached expiration, we were moving.
Looking for spaces in the city is a difficult task, because New York is expensive. So the art is to find areas that are convenient but not popular enough to garner premium rent. As our lease expired in Chinatown, the rent there was also on the rise. As I was looking, a friend of mine introduced me to a building manager at a building downtown, way down in the Financial District. I had not looked there at all because I just assumed that the rent there was unaffordable. My perception was that it was a place full of bankers and lawyers. After talking exploring this option, I learned that I was incorrect to an extent that benefited us.
As it turned out, after the recession of 2008-10, a lot of smaller financial and law firms moved out of the area, and some buildings were having a hard time finding tenants. The building we’re renting from now was one of them. When we signed the lease, the entire floor was near empty. The rent was surprising affordable, and I negotiated the rent and contract myself, so we saved more money that way. The room we settled in was brightly lit, but a bit claustrophobic feeling because it only had one window that faced a wall. It was slightly bigger than the Chinatown room, but we no longer had the common area or a kitchenette.
As winter approached, we learned what cheap rent got us – broken heating… The floor’s heating was constantly broken, a theme that would continue for over 2 years. As summer approached, we learned what cheap rent got us – broken AC… That would also be a recurring theme. It was there that a lot of the core work for Guns of Icarus was completed. One fond memory from our time there was the summer when Tobias Baumann, fellow indie developer and Unity Award winner, visited and worked with us. His help on design as well as UI made a significant difference for us.
Some time after we moved in, the building manager told us that there would be a special need school moving in on our floor. It sounded really cool, until we learned that they would section off a space on the floor where the restrooms were. So for a period of 1.5 years we would have no restrooms on our floor. This was both bad news and good.
With restrooms no longer accessible on our floor, the building eyed our space as the replacement. After a few months of inactivity, they finally made the call. Our room would become the new restrooms. They would seal off our room, and out of that cocoon was supposed to emerge a new restroom. That did end up happening, but it took a long while. Meanwhile, our building offered us an offer that would could not refuse. Because the spaces on our floor were mostly vacant, they moved us to another space down the hall for the same rent. This is the space we’re still in now, and it’s much bigger than what we had. The only thing that’s bitter sweet is that every time we go to the restroom, we’re reminded that it’s where we used to work out of.
At the space we’re in, we had our highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Arguably our greatest high and greatest low were interwoven into a singular moment and experience – the night we launched Guns of Icarus on Steam. It was also the same night Hurricane Sandy landed in New York. It was surreal still to recall what happened around this area, the devastation and the long struggle to return to normality. The storm vacated everyone in the area for weeks. While we faced the greatest crisis in our history as a team during the game launch and storm, we were able to survive and persevere. We were fortunate compared to some of the other local businesses in that area, some of whom never recovered.
As we look to migrate again, we’ll look back at the places we’ve been with nostalgia, but the possibility of moving to a new place with a new energy is really exciting. Stay tuned!