16 ms·

The daunting aftermath of releasing your dream game

91 points by danso 8y ago

pmiller2 8y ago
I kind of expected this to be about Derek Smart and Battlecruiser 3000 AD: https://timhowgego.wordpress.com/bc3k/introduction/ https://timhowgego.wordpress.com/bc3k/introduction/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD
rl3 8y ago
>Sandberg’s anxiety had continued after launch. He worried about his financial security and felt like he’d wasted the last 10 years of his life. As someone in a similar boat, the burn of "hey, I just wasted my 20s working on some project that didn't really go anywhere" is an incredibly painful pill to swallow, and perhaps something you never fully come to terms with. Life is so very short, don't waste it.
- projektir 8y ago
  > Life is so very short, don't waste it. I'm really not sure how this helps or what is the point here. Should people take no risks?
  - rl3 8y ago
    On the contrary. Take risks, just not at the expense of leading a fulfilling life. Youth is a terrible thing to waste on projects that have a statistically miniscule chance of success. Long-term solo projects are like taking a lengthy road trip. If your emotional gas tank is too low, you're going to end up miserable as you push the rest of the way, and neither accomplishes much of anything. Creative endeavors are best pursued in a happy state, which is to say not stressed out about finances nor teetering on the brink of crippling depression. The point is that people can have their cake and eat it too. As counterintuitive as that may seem, it's usually the case that most endeavors are not as urgent as they may seem, and that the risk involved is best taken from the most advantageous position possible. The time cost incurred by one's ancillary needs will likely end up a net benefit to the project in the end. The tricky part is, most people who end up working on solo projects absolutely don't envision themselves working on them for so long, so they're ill-prepared to begin with. It sort of happens by accident.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  You can rephrase that to "hey, I just spent my 20s learning". It might sound cynical, but it's really not - each failure is a lesson.
  - rl3 8y ago
    Easy enough to say in a professional context (~$1M or whatever in lost income be damned), harder to say in a personal or social context. Technically time not spent on relationships is time spent not learning in that specific regard, and the end result is being way behind the curve while peers end up married and whatnot. In keeping with the vein of your comment though, it sure as hell teaches you to value the time you've got left.
- colordrops 8y ago
  Better than wasting away in a corporate cube hell.
  - rl3 8y ago
    Usually corporate cube hell is a means to an end outside of said hell, but HN is littered with stories of people being utterly consumed (in a bad, soul-crushing way) by their workplace all the time, so good point.
    - tinus_hn 8y ago
      Stories of people just contently working in their cubicle and not caring aren’t interesting. There is a certain selection bias.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Beyond selection bias already mentioned, I suppose some of that comes from people who try to find some meaning in their corporate job. Because what's soul crushing is the realization you spend 3/4 of your waking hours doing pointless work that's not meaningful to you, your friends, or often even society at large. (Sometimes it's because it's a socially negative job that serves only to enrich some people at the cost of everyone else (cough ad cough tech), but often - perhaps more often - it's because of the complexity of our world. Your job may be a crucial component to some very socially good thing, but if it's one of thousands of such components, it can be hard to see the connection between your work and the end result.)
    - davemp 8y ago
      Cube hell isn’t the only possible situation for cube level workers either. Working with people you like on projects with varying levels of appeal, while gradually improving your personal situation, can be a very satisfying way to spend your career. Grandiose goals are a risky way to look for meaning/value in life.
  - imtringued 8y ago
    Crunch hell or cube hell are about the same. The difference is that in cube hell you walk away with a lot more money.
- grecy 8y ago
  >the burn of "hey, I just wasted my 20s working on some project that didn't really go anywhere" is an incredibly painful pill to swallow, and perhaps something you never fully come to terms with. But it's a thousand times less painful to swallow than the one that goes "I never tried to live my dreams". It's a thousand times better to try and fail than to never try at all. THAT is what life is all about.
  - sigi45 8y ago
    Is it? Minecraft and co did the one in a million. Everyone else did not. You hear very very rarely from them. While they did something without results, people around them have a house, family, holiday and money for retirement. For sure believe in your dreams but try to evaluate what you are doing. There is a tremendous amount of crap out there no one needs or wants and behind that crap there is all story.
    - redisman 8y ago
      Some people value different things. It's also not that hard to find a job which allows you to buy a house etc, when you can show how much hard work you can put in to a product. At least in the games industry these people are revered.
    - colordrops 8y ago
      I spent more than 7 years on a failed company. And this was in my 30s, let alone 20s. My friends around me are all wealthy with paid off houses. I am not. But I traveled the earth, had crazy adventures, and was able the parlay my experience into one of the most coveted jobs on earth and am now nearly financially caught up with my friends after another 5 years. It was a struggle, but it was worth it, and I have no regrets.
- unrealisticexc 8y ago
  What does it mean "not to waste your life"? That's a null statement. It doesn't really say anything. Don't suffer needlessly is a more apt advice, because everyone knows what the suffering in their context is.
- flyinglizard 8y ago
  It's only wasteful if you don't take anything away from it. Everything I've done made me better. I am nothing but the sum of my experiences.
vinceguidry 8y ago
I really wish more people would appreciate the human cost of building things by themselves instead of just chalking it all up to 'the creative journey' or some shit. It could potentially open up some really interesting service business models. If I start just about any other kind of business other than a creative one, I can buy products or services that will help me get to market 10x easier than if I try to go it without. But if I try to venture outside of established biz modes and start to wander into the creative, I don't have to go far before I'm in an awkward no man's land of ugly, no one cares kind of having to burn the candle at both ends in order to push through to some kind of stability, and this article shows that that stability is a mirage. The historical answer has always been to collect your efforts into an industry. And yeah, that option is there. You can go work for EA. But it would be so much better if the games industry didn't have to eat its young. Or at least, not all of its young. Hollywood's answer to the problem has been to double down on the community. If you want to be a screenwriter, first you need to realize that it's a hard hard thing to break into, there are always going to be more people looking to break in than there will be jobs, but you can still at least find a little bit of glory in the industry through YouTube or temping or whatever while you figure out what your plan B is. And everyone around you is going to help you figure these hard things out. But you want to break into gaming? Haha fuck you buddy. Nobody gives a shit, go work for EA and get shit out when you finally stop making them quite as much $$$ as you did when you were young and stupid. Sure, go make your own games, I don't give a shit, don't expect any kudos from me, better hope you didn't dare spend any company resources on it because yes, we will sue the shit out of you for daring to get bigger than your britches. I guess this is just my fervent hope that every industry can figure out how to be like craft beer.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  so what is your point exactly?
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    That it really doesn't have to be this way? That we can help each other?
- 8y ago
grosjona 8y ago
My first programming experience was in game development (Flash games) but I never spent more than a few months on any game... Soon, I stopped working on games altogether and started working on open source developer tools instead. Games are awesome and exciting but they almost always have a limited lifespan. I didn't like the idea of spending so much time building something that had a limited lifespan. My goal is to build a project that will outlive me. That said I have huge respect for game developers because it's such a difficult area, game developers are true artists.
Insanity 8y ago
I can relate to the feeling of 'emptiness' after release and don't think this is any different in other software fields. After working on a project for close to 2 years with 2 other people (at work) we released it and just waited for the feedback anxiously. With a lot of crunching and last minute changes as well. It was "just 2 years" and I already had such a bad feeling of not knowing what to do next that I can't even imagine what it must be like after 5 or let alone 9 years :o
- WilliamEdward 8y ago
  You have to understand that you don't lose anything, no matter the outcome. Even if your game/software sucks you can remain sane knowing you gained a valuable skill (programming, design, w/e) and a working product that you might change a bit in the future and reintroduce to the market again.
Negitivefrags 8y ago
We released our game in 2012. Since that time we have had 17 expansion releases. You might think that by now it would be easy, or at least routine. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Every time is a horrible ordeal. I often feel physically sick during the process. To start, I will have just completed a bunch of crunch. We try as much as possible to reduce this for the team, but for the founders and at least a few key people it’s always right up to the last minute. So we are already in a super stressful state. The second stressor is questioning if anyone will even come to play the game. It’s almost impossible to know. Next up, will players even like what you made? This is a dread that is hard to shake, and in our case we have a bunch of players all hyped up for a release and if they don’t like your new content there will be a lot of anger and disappointed people. People are brutal towards game developers in comments on the internet. And then there are technical issues. We are an online game and it feels like every release there is some major issue. When there are 150k people banging on the door and the game has a critical issue stopping them from playing, it’s very hard to describe the feeling when you are the responsible person and you have no idea what is wrong. Debugging in that scenario is like having an anxiety attack. These 4 issues together make game release seriously awful. You have the worst aspects of being an Artist, a Business Owner and Live Ops all in one nice package and right when you are low on sleep and after weeks of stress before hand. It’s a perfect storm of hell.
- DivisionSol 8y ago
  It might not be much from a random comment on Hacker News, but after confirming on your profile (2012... 17 content drops... Sounded familiar.) Path of Exile is an absolute treasure. GGG is one of the companies on my short-list of inspirational studios out there now. Growing off cosmetics in a F2P game is probably one of the more ethical success stories out there for those examining current industry success. Provide quality improving patches throughout the life-cycle of a major patch. Engage with fans and provide top-tier customer support. I look to what you're doing right and hope I maintain the cognizance during product development to do what you folks do to keep people happy. I'm looking forward to Delve, and I hope you know you have starry-eyed fans out there!
  - 8y ago
binbag 8y ago
Games (and books, films, music) exist in an interesting middle ground between commercial enterprise and pure art. Although I suppose most art these days has to sustain a business in some form. It wasn't always like this: art used to be sustained by rich benefactors sponsoring artists. In a way it's good that art has been somewhat democratised through capitalism, and on the other hand the stress of having to turn your art into a product must destroy quite a chunk of the creative freedom and drive. Would be interested to hear what some artists (not hobbyists who have other jobs to sustain them) would like to see happen with art in the future and its relationship to society and capitalism.
ohiovr 8y ago
My brother and I spent about 6 months in 2012 to make a game with unity3d to hit into the app store craze and we bombed pretty badly. The game had good looks, editors, customization, but lacked good game play. We basically sat down one day and said wouldn't it be cool if we made a game similar to an old arcade but with newer graphics and started to work on it. I think the most ironic thing about our efforts was that we weren't really gamers ourselves. I'm glad we did it though because we did use unity3d and C# knowledge for other things besides games (I guess we were pretty lucky). We didn't even make a single penny from our game. It was pretty depressing. Going for years on a project that you might not make a single penny on sounds terrifying.
garganzol 8y ago
Not only games cause such effects on their creators. Any piece of craft-ware does pretty much the same. I'm an enterprise software creator/publisher and sometimes I have to go through the very same lows and highs described in the article. Doing a product is hard. Much harder that you might initially think.
egypturnash 8y ago
This all sounds so familiar. I don’t make games, I make comics. Four and a half years quietly working. Another year to do a messy Kickstarter. A year of feeling lost and empty afterwards. And then, finally, starting up the familiar grind on the next project, which I’d been kicking around on and off during those two years. I know a few professional authors. They seem to be able to go from one project to another fairly easily; they also typically have much shorter schedules. I kinda envy that sometimes. A lot.
- redisman 8y ago
  You still released a new work of art into the world. It's not a small thing. 99.999% of people give up.
  - egypturnash 8y ago
    I tell myself things like that when I’m in the post-release slump. It still happens. This thing has dominated your life for several years, it’s done, it doesn’t need any more work, it’s out of your life. Now there’s this big gaping emptiness where the project used to be. The solution usually ends up being “a new project”. After a while.
DanHulton 8y ago
Yeah, this all tracks. I made a "simple" Slack RPG because I was tickled about the concept and the potential pun of the name (Slack & Slash, though Slack very predictably asked for me to change it to something a little less affiliated-sounding). I figured I'd drop six months on it and release it and see if anyone liked it. Cut forward two years later, a couple of rewrites (from idle game to turn-based combat, then from a monthly competition to a long-term progression with multiple classes), and finally I launch. It got approved by Slack, it goes up on the app directory, I make a couple key reddit posts, and... Like 5 new users. I'm sure folks here can tell the problem already - spending 2 years on development and maybe a couple days on marketing is always a recipe for a shitty launch. Over and over again, I read stories like this and think "thank God this is just a hobby for me and not my main source of income, not something I took out a loan to achieve." I like to think that if it were a more serious thing, I'd have been more serious about the marketing, but even still, that's no guarantee. Oh, also - I'm up to about 20 daily users these days. Even with that few, I still get nervous pushing out any new code. Getting very polite "Hey, the game isn't working" emails while I'm stuck at the day job and can't go fix it is devastating. I've ended up with a weird release schedule because of it - I generally only roll out code on Friday evenings, so that I have as much time as possible to fix potential bugs.
dilatedmind 8y ago
shoutout to darkfall http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/ http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/ - was the creators' dream game - 10+ years in the making - team lost funding, went without pay, and moved from sweden to greece - not a commercial success - best game ever made.
atrilumen 8y ago
I can't even read about it.

91 points by danso 8y ago

I kind of expected this to be about Derek Smart and Battlecruiser 3000 AD: https://timhowgego.wordpress.com/bc3k/introduction/ https://timhowgego.wordpress.com/bc3k/introduction/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlecruiser_3000AD

rl3 8y ago

>Sandberg’s anxiety had continued after launch. He worried about his financial security and felt like he’d wasted the last 10 years of his life. As someone in a similar boat, the burn of "hey, I just wasted my 20s working on some project that didn't really go anywhere" is an incredibly painful pill to swallow, and perhaps something you never fully come to terms with. Life is so very short, don't waste it.

projektir 8y ago
> Life is so very short, don't waste it. I'm really not sure how this helps or what is the point here. Should people take no risks?
- rl3 8y ago
  On the contrary. Take risks, just not at the expense of leading a fulfilling life. Youth is a terrible thing to waste on projects that have a statistically miniscule chance of success. Long-term solo projects are like taking a lengthy road trip. If your emotional gas tank is too low, you're going to end up miserable as you push the rest of the way, and neither accomplishes much of anything. Creative endeavors are best pursued in a happy state, which is to say not stressed out about finances nor teetering on the brink of crippling depression. The point is that people can have their cake and eat it too. As counterintuitive as that may seem, it's usually the case that most endeavors are not as urgent as they may seem, and that the risk involved is best taken from the most advantageous position possible. The time cost incurred by one's ancillary needs will likely end up a net benefit to the project in the end. The tricky part is, most people who end up working on solo projects absolutely don't envision themselves working on them for so long, so they're ill-prepared to begin with. It sort of happens by accident.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
Drdrdrq 8y ago
You can rephrase that to "hey, I just spent my 20s learning". It might sound cynical, but it's really not - each failure is a lesson.
- rl3 8y ago
  Easy enough to say in a professional context (~$1M or whatever in lost income be damned), harder to say in a personal or social context. Technically time not spent on relationships is time spent not learning in that specific regard, and the end result is being way behind the curve while peers end up married and whatnot. In keeping with the vein of your comment though, it sure as hell teaches you to value the time you've got left.
colordrops 8y ago
Better than wasting away in a corporate cube hell.
- rl3 8y ago
  Usually corporate cube hell is a means to an end outside of said hell, but HN is littered with stories of people being utterly consumed (in a bad, soul-crushing way) by their workplace all the time, so good point.
  - tinus_hn 8y ago
    Stories of people just contently working in their cubicle and not caring aren’t interesting. There is a certain selection bias.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Beyond selection bias already mentioned, I suppose some of that comes from people who try to find some meaning in their corporate job. Because what's soul crushing is the realization you spend 3/4 of your waking hours doing pointless work that's not meaningful to you, your friends, or often even society at large. (Sometimes it's because it's a socially negative job that serves only to enrich some people at the cost of everyone else (cough ad cough tech), but often - perhaps more often - it's because of the complexity of our world. Your job may be a crucial component to some very socially good thing, but if it's one of thousands of such components, it can be hard to see the connection between your work and the end result.)
  - davemp 8y ago
    Cube hell isn’t the only possible situation for cube level workers either. Working with people you like on projects with varying levels of appeal, while gradually improving your personal situation, can be a very satisfying way to spend your career. Grandiose goals are a risky way to look for meaning/value in life.
- imtringued 8y ago
  Crunch hell or cube hell are about the same. The difference is that in cube hell you walk away with a lot more money.
grecy 8y ago
>the burn of "hey, I just wasted my 20s working on some project that didn't really go anywhere" is an incredibly painful pill to swallow, and perhaps something you never fully come to terms with. But it's a thousand times less painful to swallow than the one that goes "I never tried to live my dreams". It's a thousand times better to try and fail than to never try at all. THAT is what life is all about.
- sigi45 8y ago
  Is it? Minecraft and co did the one in a million. Everyone else did not. You hear very very rarely from them. While they did something without results, people around them have a house, family, holiday and money for retirement. For sure believe in your dreams but try to evaluate what you are doing. There is a tremendous amount of crap out there no one needs or wants and behind that crap there is all story.
  - redisman 8y ago
    Some people value different things. It's also not that hard to find a job which allows you to buy a house etc, when you can show how much hard work you can put in to a product. At least in the games industry these people are revered.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    I spent more than 7 years on a failed company. And this was in my 30s, let alone 20s. My friends around me are all wealthy with paid off houses. I am not. But I traveled the earth, had crazy adventures, and was able the parlay my experience into one of the most coveted jobs on earth and am now nearly financially caught up with my friends after another 5 years. It was a struggle, but it was worth it, and I have no regrets.
unrealisticexc 8y ago
What does it mean "not to waste your life"? That's a null statement. It doesn't really say anything. Don't suffer needlessly is a more apt advice, because everyone knows what the suffering in their context is.
flyinglizard 8y ago
It's only wasteful if you don't take anything away from it. Everything I've done made me better. I am nothing but the sum of my experiences.

vinceguidry 8y ago

I really wish more people would appreciate the human cost of building things by themselves instead of just chalking it all up to 'the creative journey' or some shit. It could potentially open up some really interesting service business models. If I start just about any other kind of business other than a creative one, I can buy products or services that will help me get to market 10x easier than if I try to go it without. But if I try to venture outside of established biz modes and start to wander into the creative, I don't have to go far before I'm in an awkward no man's land of ugly, no one cares kind of having to burn the candle at both ends in order to push through to some kind of stability, and this article shows that that stability is a mirage. The historical answer has always been to collect your efforts into an industry. And yeah, that option is there. You can go work for EA. But it would be so much better if the games industry didn't have to eat its young. Or at least, not all of its young. Hollywood's answer to the problem has been to double down on the community. If you want to be a screenwriter, first you need to realize that it's a hard hard thing to break into, there are always going to be more people looking to break in than there will be jobs, but you can still at least find a little bit of glory in the industry through YouTube or temping or whatever while you figure out what your plan B is. And everyone around you is going to help you figure these hard things out. But you want to break into gaming? Haha fuck you buddy. Nobody gives a shit, go work for EA and get shit out when you finally stop making them quite as much $$$ as you did when you were young and stupid. Sure, go make your own games, I don't give a shit, don't expect any kudos from me, better hope you didn't dare spend any company resources on it because yes, we will sue the shit out of you for daring to get bigger than your britches. I guess this is just my fervent hope that every industry can figure out how to be like craft beer.

ekianjo 8y ago
so what is your point exactly?
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  That it really doesn't have to be this way? That we can help each other?
8y ago

grosjona 8y ago

My first programming experience was in game development (Flash games) but I never spent more than a few months on any game... Soon, I stopped working on games altogether and started working on open source developer tools instead. Games are awesome and exciting but they almost always have a limited lifespan. I didn't like the idea of spending so much time building something that had a limited lifespan. My goal is to build a project that will outlive me. That said I have huge respect for game developers because it's such a difficult area, game developers are true artists.

Insanity 8y ago

I can relate to the feeling of 'emptiness' after release and don't think this is any different in other software fields. After working on a project for close to 2 years with 2 other people (at work) we released it and just waited for the feedback anxiously. With a lot of crunching and last minute changes as well. It was "just 2 years" and I already had such a bad feeling of not knowing what to do next that I can't even imagine what it must be like after 5 or let alone 9 years :o

WilliamEdward 8y ago
You have to understand that you don't lose anything, no matter the outcome. Even if your game/software sucks you can remain sane knowing you gained a valuable skill (programming, design, w/e) and a working product that you might change a bit in the future and reintroduce to the market again.

Negitivefrags 8y ago

We released our game in 2012. Since that time we have had 17 expansion releases. You might think that by now it would be easy, or at least routine. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Every time is a horrible ordeal. I often feel physically sick during the process. To start, I will have just completed a bunch of crunch. We try as much as possible to reduce this for the team, but for the founders and at least a few key people it’s always right up to the last minute. So we are already in a super stressful state. The second stressor is questioning if anyone will even come to play the game. It’s almost impossible to know. Next up, will players even like what you made? This is a dread that is hard to shake, and in our case we have a bunch of players all hyped up for a release and if they don’t like your new content there will be a lot of anger and disappointed people. People are brutal towards game developers in comments on the internet. And then there are technical issues. We are an online game and it feels like every release there is some major issue. When there are 150k people banging on the door and the game has a critical issue stopping them from playing, it’s very hard to describe the feeling when you are the responsible person and you have no idea what is wrong. Debugging in that scenario is like having an anxiety attack. These 4 issues together make game release seriously awful. You have the worst aspects of being an Artist, a Business Owner and Live Ops all in one nice package and right when you are low on sleep and after weeks of stress before hand. It’s a perfect storm of hell.

DivisionSol 8y ago
It might not be much from a random comment on Hacker News, but after confirming on your profile (2012... 17 content drops... Sounded familiar.) Path of Exile is an absolute treasure. GGG is one of the companies on my short-list of inspirational studios out there now. Growing off cosmetics in a F2P game is probably one of the more ethical success stories out there for those examining current industry success. Provide quality improving patches throughout the life-cycle of a major patch. Engage with fans and provide top-tier customer support. I look to what you're doing right and hope I maintain the cognizance during product development to do what you folks do to keep people happy. I'm looking forward to Delve, and I hope you know you have starry-eyed fans out there!
- 8y ago

binbag 8y ago

Games (and books, films, music) exist in an interesting middle ground between commercial enterprise and pure art. Although I suppose most art these days has to sustain a business in some form. It wasn't always like this: art used to be sustained by rich benefactors sponsoring artists. In a way it's good that art has been somewhat democratised through capitalism, and on the other hand the stress of having to turn your art into a product must destroy quite a chunk of the creative freedom and drive. Would be interested to hear what some artists (not hobbyists who have other jobs to sustain them) would like to see happen with art in the future and its relationship to society and capitalism.

ohiovr 8y ago

My brother and I spent about 6 months in 2012 to make a game with unity3d to hit into the app store craze and we bombed pretty badly. The game had good looks, editors, customization, but lacked good game play. We basically sat down one day and said wouldn't it be cool if we made a game similar to an old arcade but with newer graphics and started to work on it. I think the most ironic thing about our efforts was that we weren't really gamers ourselves. I'm glad we did it though because we did use unity3d and C# knowledge for other things besides games (I guess we were pretty lucky). We didn't even make a single penny from our game. It was pretty depressing. Going for years on a project that you might not make a single penny on sounds terrifying.

garganzol 8y ago

Not only games cause such effects on their creators. Any piece of craft-ware does pretty much the same. I'm an enterprise software creator/publisher and sometimes I have to go through the very same lows and highs described in the article. Doing a product is hard. Much harder that you might initially think.

egypturnash 8y ago

This all sounds so familiar. I don’t make games, I make comics. Four and a half years quietly working. Another year to do a messy Kickstarter. A year of feeling lost and empty afterwards. And then, finally, starting up the familiar grind on the next project, which I’d been kicking around on and off during those two years. I know a few professional authors. They seem to be able to go from one project to another fairly easily; they also typically have much shorter schedules. I kinda envy that sometimes. A lot.

redisman 8y ago
You still released a new work of art into the world. It's not a small thing. 99.999% of people give up.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  I tell myself things like that when I’m in the post-release slump. It still happens. This thing has dominated your life for several years, it’s done, it doesn’t need any more work, it’s out of your life. Now there’s this big gaping emptiness where the project used to be. The solution usually ends up being “a new project”. After a while.

DanHulton 8y ago

Yeah, this all tracks. I made a "simple" Slack RPG because I was tickled about the concept and the potential pun of the name (Slack & Slash, though Slack very predictably asked for me to change it to something a little less affiliated-sounding). I figured I'd drop six months on it and release it and see if anyone liked it. Cut forward two years later, a couple of rewrites (from idle game to turn-based combat, then from a monthly competition to a long-term progression with multiple classes), and finally I launch. It got approved by Slack, it goes up on the app directory, I make a couple key reddit posts, and... Like 5 new users. I'm sure folks here can tell the problem already - spending 2 years on development and maybe a couple days on marketing is always a recipe for a shitty launch. Over and over again, I read stories like this and think "thank God this is just a hobby for me and not my main source of income, not something I took out a loan to achieve." I like to think that if it were a more serious thing, I'd have been more serious about the marketing, but even still, that's no guarantee. Oh, also - I'm up to about 20 daily users these days. Even with that few, I still get nervous pushing out any new code. Getting very polite "Hey, the game isn't working" emails while I'm stuck at the day job and can't go fix it is devastating. I've ended up with a weird release schedule because of it - I generally only roll out code on Friday evenings, so that I have as much time as possible to fix potential bugs.

dilatedmind 8y ago

shoutout to darkfall http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/ http://www.sickenger.com/articles/the_making_of_darkfall/ - was the creators' dream game - 10+ years in the making - team lost funding, went without pay, and moved from sweden to greece - not a commercial success - best game ever made.

atrilumen 8y ago

I can't even read about it.