Hmm, interesting question. Not sure how well I can answer, given that I probably either internalized or forgot most of the lessons learned by now (I worked on t

Hmm, interesting question. Not sure how well I can answer, given that I probably either internalized or forgot most of the lessons learned by now (I worked on this for years and abandoned it almost a year ago), but I'll try. Working on something I was passionate about and sticking with it for a long time was definitely good. Even though it wasn't successful in the end, it was way better than all those projects that I thought would be a "good idea", but never finished because I didn't really care. Rust is awesome. It was already awesome when I started using it for the project in late 2013/early 2014 and it's way better now. It has become my go-to language for everything. Setting up a simple website with a newsletter signup form was a very good decision. I wrote a short blurb on the home page (still there), put the signup form right under it (no longer there), and de-emphasized all other content. Even though I did near zero marketing, that approach got me to almost 40 subscribers. Not a lot, but apparently enough to get to the front page of Hacker News. (To be clear, I did nothing to get this on Hacker News. One of the subscribers must have posted this, and it went from there.) The newsletter also attracted my only co-developer, even though I wasn't looking for one at all. He was a huge help, and the main reason the project wasn't abandoned half a year before that ended up happening anyway. During the course of the project I changed direction a few times. Some of those changes couldn't be avoided, but others could have. In the beginning I thought that the technology not working out would be the biggest problem, so I started out by putting the fundamentals (rendering, user input, networking etc.) in place first, then build the game on top. The technology never was the problem, however, the game design was (and all that networking code made it harder to iterate on the game design). If I were to do it again, I would start out much simpler. I probably would build a simple single-player game to work out the basic building blocks first, then extend that step by step towards the MMO that I always envisioned. Ideally, this approach would have led to a series of small releases early on, which could have had a lot of benefits. It was pretty harmful to put most of my professional life on hold for this project, as I ended up doing. I did enough consulting work on the side to survive, but didn't put much effort or thought into the long-term viability of my business. As a result, my business today isn't very viable :) I think it would have been possible to choose a more synergistic approach, for example by polishing and releasing parts of the backend technology along the way, and trying to leverage that into well-paying consulting engagements. I'm actually trying out a similar approach right now, although in the field of embedded software. That's basically all I can think of at the moment. I hope it's helpful.