For about a year now I’ve considered starting a business blog. I had a few obstacles that I needed answers to before starting: what am I offering that isn’t already out there? Who is my audience?

My answer: There are few companies out there like Klei Entertainment. We developed an indie game that went casual, and totally missed the sweet spot. We’ve developed for the Xbox Live Arcade. We helped jump start another studio, now making N+. We’ve worked with publishers. We’ve self-published. Certainly, someone can benefit from my experience, and I believe in giving back to the community.

So, starting today, every Thursday I will post a new bit of rambling. Some of it will be technical (I’m a programmer by trade, and much of that geekiness lives), much of it will be my own opinions about the wonderful business we’re in, and most of it I hope you’ll angrily disagree with me so we can have an interesting conversation.

What’s the quote of the day? “Make sure your board is sufficiently weird”.

I love that.

I grabbed that line from a book I’m currently reading: Re-imagine by Tom Peters, and I can’t agree with it more. Klei (that’s pronounced “clay”, by the way) is staffed by a serious hodge podge of people. Sure, we have a couple industry veterans, but several key staff are also weird people who have no preconceptions of what the “right way” to develop a game is. This can bring some amazing results when mixed with people from the industry who are fed up with the “right way” to spend millions of dollars to create a game you’re not sure people will enjoy. Most of the people I trust the most for advice are weird people who don’t deal with inconsequential things like video games (but would love to get a Wii if they could find one).

I believe that there’s a huge opportunity to rethink how we develop games. By developing smarter, and destroying old preconceptions, extremely high quality games can be created with amazingly small budgets. For starters:

- Choose games that won’t break your back developing them. If you’re a small developer tight on cash, WHY are you developing a content intense game? Surely there’s another game you can be excited about that doesn’t kill your staff.

- Destroy old processes that aren’t doing anything. If your employees roll their eyes when you ask them to do something in the process, either get them to buy in or figure out why it’s stupid. For example: the only time I’ve ever seen a smoke test break is when someone forgot to fix the smoke test.

- Challenge notions of what is needed to build a game. Lots of time, lots of people, lots of money? As Gordon Bell says “I’ve never seen a project being worked on by 500 engineers that couldn’t be done better by 50″. Try cutting from 50 to 5, and I think you’ll be amazed at the result.

This blog is all about rethinking how game developers look at games. From the design of games, to the code that makes them, to how different teams interact, to how we look at and treat users — lets create new notions, new systems, new processes, and then destroy them again

Okay, now… disagree!

Edit: I changed the title and wording to better reflect my thoughts. Destroy your preconceptions, dammit!