游戏邦注：本文原作者是Tiffany Smith，她与打算自己开工作室的人分享了五条建议，以使各位少走弯路。

1、你认为组建工作室需要多少资金，就应该先算出数目并将其翻倍考虑。

启动工作室以前，我自以为已经精打细算到每一个零头的开销，却万万没有想到还有这么多意料之外的成本。因为我们有一个家庭办公室，使用的是临时商业办公地点和会议/展示场所，所以我们总是希望为自己的员工供应午餐，并且希望伙食能好一点。

等到所有事都纳入考虑范围的时候，就看有多少人会吃午餐了。你可以假设底线是一千块。当个好客人非常重要，虽然我一直在心里盘算着不能太抠门，但代价真的很大。午餐开销还只是一小部分——我们还没把旅游费、营业税之类的费用算进去呢。

run_business(from the3dtechnologies.com)

2、和朋友合伙做生意请务必小心

因为生意出错，我失去了一个朋友。但愿他是唯一的一个吧。如果我事先考虑周全，那种情况也许可以避免。你和朋友搭伙做生意时，往往会认为合同什么的没必要。事实上，签合同非常有必要！

没人希望和朋友为了一纸合同反复纠缠，不然大家都会觉得这是彼此不信任的表现。这就好比向别人求婚，又要求人家和你签婚前协议。信任哪里去了？我不敢说结婚是不是真的要签婚前协议，但说到生意，合同绝对是必需的，不管你跟对方的关系有多铁。

3、谨惕“事成付款”的交易

我们好像得到不少这类提议了——可能是因为我们是小公司，所以别人就不怎么把我们放在眼里；也可能是因为我们看起来就是不太入流，我也不知道怎么回事。总之，我们经常遇到那些要我们修改、发送、更新他们游戏的人，而且，他们会提出“在游戏赚钱的时候”再向我们付款的要求。

这种要求几乎总是坏主意，为什么？请看：

第一计：好莱坞式会计学。这是一种惯例，他们夸大自己的支出成本，旨在尽可能获得比实际投入更多的预算，这样他们就可以从中揩油了。

第二计：如果游戏没赚钱，你也别想赚钱。他们把自己的第一人射击游戏吹得天花乱坠，实际上那款游戏你压根没听过。什么在360平台独领风骚若干年，什么他们现在想开拓PS3市场，什么你们公司能接手这单生意真是幸运，事实上这些都是浮云。

最后一计：花钱赚钱。你不知道能赚多少钱，所以你自然不能有效地做预算。无论你是赚回老本还是小有赢利，这都是孤注一掷的冒险。

我们曾经被彻底地宰过两次。我是不是有点迟钝？那是因为我想要钱！

4、你得牺牲许多时间

自己规划时间真是太棒了。我幻想自己有一张轻松又赚钱的工作计划表，那样我就可以避开激烈竞争的喧嚣。吃饭时就好好吃饭，想工作时就工作。不，现实远比想象残酷。我无时不刻地工作，就算没在工作的时候我也想着工作。而我在别人手下工作时从来不会这样——把工作丢给上班时间多么容易啊。

5、有时候动力也会累

总有那么些时候，你真想抛下一切，回到替别人打工的状态。不同的人有不同的坚持动力。对我而言，我撑下去的动力就是维持生计。我和丈夫Rob不仅是同行同专业，我们还在同一家公司干，我们是唯一两个能将工作室维持下去的人。如果出了差错，我们很快就会一败涂地。

如果说我从自立门户中吸取了什么教训，一言以蔽之，做生意就像养小孩子，为了让他茁壮成长，你得用心呵护、关爱有加；新生意就像一棵小树苗，需要一心一意的栽培才能长成苍天大树。做生意时难免犯错，但每一步你都得审思慎行、反复考量。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Opinion: Top 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Own Business

by Tiffany Smith

[In this reprinted #altdevblogaday-opinion piece, Nameless founder Tiffany Smith shares the five pieces of advice she wishes someone had given her before starting her own studio -- so you don't have to make the same mistakes!]

1. However much money you think you’ll need to start a business, you should take that number and double it

I thought I had strategically planned every penny when I first started, but I had no idea that there would be so many unanticipated costs. Since we have a home office, I use temporary commercial office space and conference solutions for meetings and demonstrations. We always like to buy lunch for our clients, and we like them to lunch well.

By the time everything is factored in, depending on how many people will be at lunch, you could be looking at a cool grand just as a baseline. Being a good host is very important, and it’s something that in my mind should not be skimped on, but it’s expensive. These costs are just a few; we have also incurred other unexpected expenses from things like travel to business taxes.

2. Doing business with friends should be approached very carefully

I have lost a friend because of a business deal gone wrong. Hopefully it will be the only one, but it did happen. Had I thought about it beforehand, the situation may have been avoided. When you do business with friends, you tend to think of contracts as unnecessary, but they are very necessary.

Nobody wants to go back and forth on a contract with a friend; you start to feel like you’re saying you don’t trust them. It’s like asking someone to marry you, and then asking them to sign a prenuptial agreement. What happened to the trust? I’m not saying it’s true for marriage, but a contract is absolutely necessary for a business agreement, no matter how close you are to the person on the other end of the deal.

3. Be cautious about deals with payment on the back end

We seem to get a lot of this type of proposition; it might be because we are such a small company, and thus we’re taken a little less seriously, or maybe it’s because we look like suckers, I don’t know. Either way, we are often approached by people who want us to revamp, port, or update their game, and they’ll pay us “when the game makes money”.

It’s almost always a bad idea and here’s why:

- Hollywood accounting. The practice in which people inflate their costs in order to make it look like they spent more money in production than they did, just so that they may pocket the change. Wikipedia explains it way better than I can.

- If the game doesn’t make anything, you don’t either. People are very quick to tell you how their great FPS — which you’ve strangely never heard of — sold so well on the 360 several years ago that they now want to bring it to PS3, and we’re the lucky company that they approached to make the deal.

- This kind of ties in to the last point; it costs money to make money. The problem with back end deals is that you don’t know how much you’re going to make, if anything, so you can’t budget effectively. It’s an all-out gamble as to whether you’ll get out as much or more than you put in.

We have had two situations where we were completely ripped off. Do I sound a little jaded? It’s because I want my money! You know who you are if you’re reading.

4. You’ll sacrifice a lot of time

Setting your own hours is a wonderful thing, and I imagined a cushy little offset schedule so that I could avoid the hustle and bustle of the rest of the rat race. Eating lunch at silly times and generally just working when I felt like it. Nope, not at all. I work all hours, and when I’m not working, I still find myself thinking about work. This was never the case when I worked for anyone else. It was so much easier to leave the job at work.

5. Motivation is hard when times aren’t good

There are days when you just want to throw it all in and go work for somebody else. Motivation comes in different forms for different people. For me, it comes with needing to make ends meet. Not only do my husband Rob and I work in the same industry at the same profession but we also both work at the same company, and we are the only two people who can keep it going. If this goes wrong, we could be in a bad place very quickly.

If there is an overall lesson that I have learned with regard to starting up my own business, and if I could sum it up in fewer words, I would say that I think a business should be thought of like a tiny little baby that needs to be nurtured and loved in order to grow. A new business is a tiny little entity that requires your undivided attention in order for it to thrive. You’re going to make mistakes in raising it, but you have to keep reassessing and making the best decisions you can every single step of the way.

[This piece was reprinted from #AltDevBlogADay, a shared blog initiative started by @mike_acton devoted to giving game developers of all disciplines a place to motivate each other to write regularly about their personal game development passions.] （source:gamasutra）