Should game studio startup employees be allowed to moonlight?

Frank and Alexia (names changed for anonymity) are artists at two Singapore game studios by day. By night, they crack their brains together over coding and game design for their own indie development startup, Studio Moonchild. Started as an experiment for both Frank and Alexia, Studio Moonchild has already put out one game, a fancy-looking Flappy Bird clone called Splashy Birds.

As game artists, Frank and Alexia both had to learn to code in order to get their game off the ground. The studios they work at are pretty busy ones as well. Do you think their employers should support this kind of activity, ban it outright, or turn a blind eye?

Art from the Gamecot Studio game, Penguin Up!

Gamecot Studio, developer of the casual game Penguin Up!, was started by three individuals who worked – or are still working – full-time in the IT industry. While co-founder Dominic Chai has gone full-time at Gamecot, he says the other two are awaiting “divine intervention” to jump ship. Their employers don’t know about it – and may never find out.

Moonlighting is pretty common no matter what industry you look at. But watching employees of a game startup work on their own startup piques a certain curiosity. Startups already need all the help and focus they can get – to work on something else on the sideline just takes away from that focus.

While moonlighting is undoubtedly something that boils down to the individual – some people think it’s fine to make extra cash on the side while others find that unethical – it’s also an issue that’s eventually unavoidable if you’re running a scrappy team full of people hungry to build their own futures.

See: Meet Ogrehead: the Indian studio behind Asura, one of the cooler indie games coming out this year

Is moonlighting in secret okay?

For the moonlighter, it makes sense to keep an employer in the dark. It’s tough for a moonlighting team member to draw the line between his or her startup and the one he or she’s working for, and tougher still for an employer to draw a line neatly between the two without knowing what exactly the employee is thinking about. When it comes to games creation, a task that involves blood, sweat, tears, and possibly your own soul, it gets even more difficult.

It’s easy for a game you can truly call your own to slowly take precedence over the one you’re working on for your day job. Conversely, how would an employer be able to tell if you’re spending time at your day job thinking about the tweaks and mods you’re going to make to your own game after work?

We haven’t even begun to factor in how developing a game on the side would be in direct competition with what you do at work.

The product of many late nights after work!

Should employers allow their staff to moonlight?

Of course, you do have individuals like Edmund Ching, who has made a couple of interesting games (try them here and here) under the name Unexpect3rd Developments. Ching is a full-time programmer with Lambdamu Games by day. Lambdamu Games is best known for the worldwide hit, Pixel People. Ching has developed five games in total for Unexpect3rd. While not huge, Flappy Bird-esque successes, they have their fans.

Ching’s work on his own games is not an issue to Lambdamu Games. CEO and co-founder Ivan Loo says that the company is totally okay with sideline development.

[I]t really says something about someone if they are able to work on games on their own time while having a day job doing the same exact thing. We’re all for encouraging this sort of passion in the industry. On the other hand, restricting these sort of actions just feels a little hypocritical. Both Abhishek (Lambdamu co-founder) and I were once employees ourselves and I guess we know that no amount of restrictions would actually be able to stop us from doing this.

But while some studios are fine with moonlighting, others definitely are not.

Even large and comfortable companies have a bottom line regarding moonlighting. The official Wargaming Asia stand is that employees aren’t allowed to moonlight, but are allowed to pursue personal passions or interests as long as these don’t conflict with their day jobs.

See: Wargaming Asia has a huge remote team. Here’s how it keeps it all together

At Philippine studio Altitude Games, CEO Gabby Dizon says that while people do take time off to attend game jams in their personal time, they don’t go out and start their own studios.

Students at the Global Game Jam 2014 in Singapore.

Dizon shares my sentiments when it comes to affording game studio startup employees freedom to work on their own games.

We allow our team members to moonlight as long as they’re not doing game development on the side. While we try to allow as much freedom as we can, it can get tricky to have someone working on a game studio by day and their own game on the side. There are many potential conflicts that we would rather avoid.

CEO and founder of Mosscube, Tan Wai Chong, doesn’t support moonlighting either. Mosscube recently launched its first game, Mighty Monsters: Rise of the Minions, a quirky turn-based strategy game. He says that his team is 110 percent committed to what they’re doing, and that there’s a high sense of job satisfaction and achievement in Mosscube. He adds that he doesn’t think employees who are fully-committed – the way Mosscube’s team is – would have the time nor energy to do so.

Art from Mosscube’s first game, Mighty Monsters: Rise of the Minions.

“We all know that to be really good at something, we have to focus our entire attention to our tasks and cannot afford any forms of distraction,” he says. Of course, Tan has a different approach for employees who want to start out on their own. Tan says he would invest in the employee’s startup if it made sense, and that if the offer was rejected, he’d still give his blessings.

“The basic fundamentals is that I believe a lot in my team. They work for me because I believe they are good and have the right attitude. In return, they know I will take care of them and lead them to achieve something we’re proud to say is ours. The day that they think they have learned enough from me and have the confidence to start their own game studio […] means I have done my part as a boss to groom them.”

Allowing a startup employee to moonlight is definitely a tricky issue with many angles to consider. Fortunately, there are also just as many possible solutions to it. It just depends on the route you’re looking to take.

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Should game studio startup employees be allowed to moonlight?