The Birth of Code On

A lot of people have asked questions and wondered why I have entered the sphere of business! This is why I’ve decided to write a blog to disseminate my thoughts and experiences during my initial year establishing Cognition Games Company Ltd. I will attempt to address questions people may have as well as grant an insight into the journey of a small Irish business, of which (I hope!) remains still in its infancy. This blog will also represent documented progression of the company and will hopefully encourage other people to start their own projects, whilst also informing people about the trials, tribulations and obstacles that one encounters.

A question I often get asked is why did you start your own business? Every small business starts with an idea… but why board / card games? I suppose initial thoughts about implementing a side project came to me around October time of 2019. This was a period in my life whereby I experienced a lot of free time as my year was decimated with sport injuries. Those that know me, know that sport plays a crucial role in my life, something that occupied every minute of my spare time for as long as I can remember. Through a combination of soccer and Gaelic football, every weekend and most weekdays were taken up kicking around a ball. Most notably, when I was 16, I can count being part of 7 different sports teams between soccer and Gaelic football at school, club and county level. Such was sport’s prominence, all of a sudden when I was enveloped by a succession of injuries, I had plenty of free time on my hands and was willing to fill that free time with a venture that excited me.

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October 2019: A conversation with fellow Bioinformatics PhD student Steven McLoughlin occurred around October last year. He talked of how he and other NUI students entered an innovation event, whereby they created a game (a totally different idea and in a completely different domain to "Code On") to help promote awareness and educate. In fact, his team won the competition, with the judges commending his idea on the re-usability of the product, its scalability and it’s cost-effectiveness. Although Steven never followed through fully with his idea (he still has plenty of time and there’s also potential for us to collaborate on future projects), this was a seminal event in terms of developing my own ideas. We also discussed that the school classroom environment is a relatively untapped market, but could represent an goldmine if the correct idea and games were put in place. After all, having talked to teachers, a recurrent phrase regarding new teaching methods being integrated into the classroom was “engaging”. Learning educational concepts and ideas from a hands-on, interactive games is surely far more engaging than monotonously reading lines from a book!

November 2019: It was on a flight to Singapore, to see my good friend Aaron Costello, that I purchased a notepad & pen in Heathrow’s WHSmith, before giving free reign to my thoughts and ideas over the impending 13 hour flight. I came up with a concept, visualised gameplay as well as designing a logo. Whilst nonchalantly strolling around the Singapore Botanical Gardens, I detailed my ideas to Aaron and we discussed its strengths and potential flaws. Although this game wasn’t the concept for “Code On”, it may represent a future avenue to progress with. More pertinently though, it caused me to critically evaluate and dissect my idea, and consider other thoughts and ideas for other games.

December 2019: I was ambling around Galway considering what presents to get the family for Christmas. Christmas is great family occasion, and what usually brings the family together (or apart) over this festive period? .... board games. I purchased “Catan” for my older brother aswell as Trivial Pursuit for my mother. While I was selecting those games, ideas for bringing a game myself to life snowballed. This is where the initial idea for “Code On” was born. My initial idea involved a complete board game as opposed to the eventual card game. I felt as a starting product I should scale it down, and if successful, I always had the opportunity for progression and upscale if required. With the initial concept in my head, I dabbled with different names for my creation. “CRISPR Codebreaker” was the initial name, and I decided to develop a logo to accompany this name. I used Powerpoint to generate the logo into what I thought at the time was an interesting and captivating!:

Thankfully, I soon stumbled upon Photoshop and the Adobe suite of tools to generate colourful and more entertaining digital pictures. Patience from here was required, as it is an overwhelming experience being introduced to new software with multiple buttons and endless functionalities. I first engaged with Photoshop, but after dipping between the 2 packages I found Adobe Illustrator to be a lot more user-friendly and it became my predominant software henceforth for design and illustration. I then proceeded to create the logo and decided upon the colour scheme that would ultimately become synonymous with “Code On”. Now that I had a (very basic!) grasp of the illustrator functions, I proceeded to design and develop my cards for my first prototype. By this stage I was extremely invested in the project, and determined to see a first prototype of my creation. So much was my determination to bring this project to fruition, that I spent every evening leading up to Christmas designing cards, most notably missing my PhD Christmas party (although I did have a bad flu at the time!). Once I could see progress, I was determined to bring the idea to life….