Ladies and gentlemen, the announcement you've all been waiting for: I am now officially the sole proprietor of my own company, ZWOLYA GAMES!
This all came about as a response to one of Steam's requirements, registering as an individual or as a company. I was thinking of what would be best for branding, both now and moving forward, and it was obvious that having a common umbrella under which I could release anything in the future would be the best option. I have plenty of ideas, and people tend to remember the catchy name rather than the individual developer.
Now, it's not easy to do anything once the government needs to get involved. Over the past months, I've had to fill out a dozen forms, pay for my fictional name, pay for "advertising" in various places, pay for a tax EIN, open a business bank account, and get my new company vetted by Steam. I'm not sure what they could tell about it without any history to speak of yet, but rules are rules.
After waiting all the requisite time periods for each step along the way, I've finally been cleared, and granted a Steam app id. The app id is like a password; you plug it into a few different places when using the Steamworks SDK, and it allows you access to the different features. Now I can go ahead with testing things like achievements, online leaderboards...and especially uploading my game at all. This is all extremely exciting, but I have to resist for a while longer; you see, once you add Steam to your game, you can't exactly take it out easily. I still want to release a public beta build in maybe a week or so (!), and it should be free to play without requiring a Steam account. Once that's done, it's full Steam ahead (pun absolutely intended).
The most important part of the entire process, of course, was designing a killer logo:
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