Insurgent Studios works as project managers and technical consultants. Clients bring us in when a piece of work needs someone who can both run it and understand it: plan and manage the delivery, judge whether the technical approach is sound, and stay accountable for the result.
We have done that since 2005, across video games, virtual worlds, museum installations, fintech, higher education and developer infrastructure. The project archive records the work itself; this page describes the kinds of engagement behind it.
Starting and building studios
We have been brought in twice to start a development studio from nothing, and both times we did it.
For VEEMEE we helped found and set up a virtual world development studio in central Edinburgh, hiring and training a team of twenty and taking on studio and project management, technical direction, client relationships and the coordination of external production teams. The projects that studio went on to deliver for Audi, Billabong, Wrangler, Sega and Sony ran through that structure.
From January to August 2017 we set up Skymoons Edinburgh, working with the company’s Chinese parent and the incoming Edinburgh management. That meant building the team through hiring as well as the technical pre-production the new studio needed to begin work. Skymoons was based in our own offices until it outgrew them and moved to its own premises.
This is founding work rather than advice about founding: recruitment, technical direction, the early production decisions, and somewhere to sit while the studio finds its feet.
Project and programme management
Beyond studio set-up, we manage delivery on individual projects and across longer programmes. For the two Scottish Enterprise-funded Intermediary Technology Institutes we provided project management and technical expertise across pre-commercialisation research and development over a number of years, covering e-learning, gamification, data analysis and information extraction.
Technical due diligence and advisory
Assessing a platform, a team and a plan on behalf of the people responsible for them. In the first half of 2018 we provided technical due diligence and project management oversight for BTL Group, a blockchain technology company with offices in London, Vancouver and Calgary, while it developed its Interbit platform. The engagement ran for three to four months, working closely with the London office alongside a visit to Vancouver.
This is the work to commission when a decision depends on an honest reading of an unfamiliar technology: whether the approach holds together, whether the plan can be delivered, and where the risks sit.
It is also how some clients have first met us — including the first of all. Insurgent’s founding engagement, in 2005, was a project due diligence on Rail Simulator for its developer, Kuju Entertainment, and Fund4Games, the company funding its development. Having read it, both asked us to come on board and manage and deliver the product itself — which we did, through to release in 2007 and on into the handover to the successor company that is today Dovetail Games.
Funding applications and research programmes
We write funding applications and we win them. Over the years that has included:
- Multiple successful Scottish Enterprise grant applications for VEEMEE
- A successful application to Scottish Enterprise’s High Growth Ventures for Square Slice Studios, which took the company to New York in September 2016 on a Scottish Enterprise market programme
- A successful EIT Digital consortium application for GiftGuard, which we led, working with Ingenico, Bitwise and the University of Edinburgh on a proposed budget of over €600,000
- Innovate UK funding of approximately £75,000 for The Reality Lab, a mixed reality teaching platform we then developed
- Creative Informatics’ Creative Horizon programme, supporting our work with Edinburgh College of Art on opening up its animation archive
Forming a consortium, defining a programme and preparing the application is a discipline of its own, and one we can take on alongside delivering the work that follows. Not every funded proposal becomes a product: GiftGuard was scheduled into EIT Digital’s portfolio and then lost to delays in its funding arrangements.
Infrastructure teams depend on
Since 2020 we have managed infrastructure for several clients — the systems their staff rely on to do their work, rather than the products those teams ship. That has meant moving source control and remote access off on-site servers into AWS, reached over a VPN from wherever people are working, and specifying, building and maintaining bespoke continuous integration servers that produce product builds and handle releases, including uploads to Steam.
Both became critical infrastructure for their clients, and the ongoing maintenance is the larger part of the engagement: keeping systems dependable over years, rather than handing over a project and moving on. The same interest in the tools teams actually work with produced Depot Desk, our own Git interface for teams handling large assets that are difficult to merge.
How engagements run
They vary in length. BTL was a defined question with an end date, answered over three to four months. Rail Simulator ran the other way: a due diligence that turned into three years of delivery on the product and a handover to the team that took it forward. Skymoons was an eight-month set-up with a clear handover at the end of it. The infrastructure engagements have continued since 2020 and are still maintained. The ITI programmes ran over a number of years. We are equally comfortable with a fixed piece of work that needs an answer and with a standing responsibility that has to be kept running.
If you have something in mind, tell us about it.