Aj Grand-Scrutton is the founder and CEO of Dlala Studios, the UK indie responsible for Windows 8 exclusive Janksy.Writing this column is a strange one for me.Most people can only just stand to listen to me talking, let alone then ask me to write an article for a website, so first things first, I'll introduce myself. Most of you reading this probably have no idea who I am, after all.My name is Aj Grand-Scrutton and I'm the CEO of Dlala Studios. But, seeing as I've been working out of my parents' garage for the last seven months, perhaps the title 'CEO' is a little pretentious.So why have I asked been to write a guest article for you lovely people? What could some grotty Essex boy tell you about making computer games?Well, I've had a very short yet eventful career so far. I spent 3 years at Jagex (creators of RuneScape) working on the yet-to-be-released MMO Stellar Dawn.It was at Jagex I met my partner in crime Craig Thomas, and I then moved from Jagex to start up studio Bossa Studios. It was here that I and, later on, Craig worked on the Facebook game Monstermind.In March 2012, Monstermind took home the BAFTA for Best Online Browser Game.MonstermindIt was at this point that I started to evaluate pretty much everything about myself.I'd been working myself into an early grave. I was giving my day job 100 percent as well as somehow conjuring up another 100 percent to throw into managing and touring with my band.On top of this, while I loved Bossa and the people I worked with, Facebook games weren't where my heart was.In May 2012, Craig and I made the decision to go it alone. It was something we had both always planned to do at a later stage in life, but it just felt like the right time. So in June 2012 Dlala Studios was born.This leads me on nicely to discuss our first game, Janksy, a space-based adventure that we built exclusively for Windows 8.I imagine many of you are thinking, 'why Windows 8?'When we started the studio we had a lot of conversations and brainstorms about a lot of topics. One constant that remained throughout the process was the fact that we had zero budget.With this in mind, Windows 8 soon became very appealing. It was a fresh market, with relatively little competition, and with the announcement of the Surface we knew that Microsoft would be putting some weight behind it.However, it still felt like a risk. Frankly, when we made the decision to go indie we were worried that Microsoft would be assholes. Luckily, for us, it turns out they weren't.Our first real interaction was meeting some of the Windows 8 guys at Develop in July 2012, around a month after our studio was officially formed. I had a chat with a great guy called Andrew Webber, and they seemed really supportive of the indie scene.Most importantly, they seemed really honest, too.They acknowledged that Microsoft hadn't shown appreciation towards the little guys in the past and explained that there was a big change coming with Windows 8 and Microsoft's attitudes in general.We continued emailing back and forth for a week or two then Dlala came to the decision that we were going to do a Windows 8 game.But it was going to be tight  we had nine and a half weeks to take a game from concept to publishing, something which none of the team had ever done before.Fortunately, we had a lot of support from Microsoft, who provided us technical support whenever we were asking questions that there were no answers to on the net.We got to meet the guys behind the tools of Visual Studio and TFS too, tools which we got for free through Bizspark.As an aside, I would definitely recommend that any small/indie studios reading this should check out Bizspark . After all, it was nice to be able to get a lot of software that we wanted for free legitimately.It was also the guys at Microsoft who introduced us to Will Freeman at Develop magazine, which led to Dlala featuring on the cover of Develop's October 2012 edition  a massive highpoint for us.Microsoft put me forward for a few talks, too, and this year alone I went from being told I wasn't media trained enough to do any talks, to speaking at TIGA events, Apps World Europe, Evolve, Ignite and getting invited to do more next year.It has felt like we've had this big brother there to look after us and it's been completely invaluable.Now things are changing a lot with at Dlala. We've moved into the Microsoft building in Soho and are working directly with Microsoft.While Windows 8 is still in it's early stages, it did exactly what we hoped, giving us visibility as a developer and getting us noticed.How things will go with us, Microsoft, Windows 8 and the world in general  only time will tell.To find out more about Dlala Studios, you can visit the company's website or follow Aj on Twitter