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.