6 ms·

Spent about $200000 on developing a real-time massive multiplayer online strategy game just to run out of money then fail our Kickstarter: https://www.kickstart

Spent about $200000 on developing a real-time massive multiplayer online strategy game just to run out of money then fail our Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadboard/terra-mango-a-location-based-strategy-game https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadboard/terra-mango-... We already had 4000+ people sign up to play once it hit beta, and even had local news cover us: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/terra-mango-could-be-the-next-big-thing-for-smartphones https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/terra-mango-could-be-the-n... We vastly underestimated our ability to market the game and to influence people, even our own friends. We should have shipped a somewhat slow and buggy beta version to those 4000 people who signed up to beta test. Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping. Or maybe we just had a bad idea

mysterydip 5y ago
"perfect is the enemy of good enough" I learned a few years ago. Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting as I'm working a multiplayer project right now. What was your marketing budget like? How did you get those 4000 people? Do you have a postmortem or dev log from the time?
- harel 5y ago
  I've seen enough failures exactly because "Perfect was the enemy of Good enough". It's a good mantra.
  - typon 5y ago
    What about underpromise and overdeliver?
    - harel 5y ago
      What about it? Nobody ever complained if they were over delivered did they?
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        But in a world where hype is the standard, you will likely just get ignored, if you do not hype, but undersell your product.
  - mapmap 5y ago
    The version of this phrase that I am familiar with is “perfect is the enemy of done.”
- davidmurdoch 5y ago
  To get the list of people: We went to a lot of indie meetups/presentations, posted all over Reddit at every opportunity (got on the front page of many gaming subreddits a bunch of times), constantly spammed our friends (there were 5 of us working on it), got involved with faculty and students at Full Sail University, anything we could. We were all very passionate about it and it pretty much consumed every waking hour of our lives; I even refinanced my home to pay for development. It was an incredibly fun endeavor... until it wasn't. Haha. We never did a post mortem because it didn't actually end... It just fizzled out (it did end some friendships though). I (lead dev and co-founder) left the project and my ownership share (after the Kickstarter failed) to the other partners; . They then tried to find someone to either buy or invest in the development of the project for a few years. I only got notice that they finally stopped paying the server bill a week or so ago. Good luck on your game endeavors!
  - rootsudo 5y ago
    Is Fullsail university a good place, or a diploma mill? Their commercial spots of a decade ago made it seem 1:1 to places like Everest University or ITT Tech.
    - davidmurdoch 5y ago
      I don't know. We thought it was the best graphics school in central Florida (where I live) and we had an in with a professor there. We paid some students there for most of the 3d modeling work we needed.
- marcos100 5y ago
  The problem is knowing what is "good enough". It comes with experience and, if you're doing something new to you, I think it's hard to assess. You may probably tell what went in hindsight, but even then, it's just one if in the lifetime of the project. "Oh, we could've released when x was done". Maybe, but maybe not too.
kingcharles 5y ago
> Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping. I see this a lot. I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with something before we release it?
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  I think that's a big part of it. I think there's also the difference between treating something as art and something as product.
- CodeWriter23 5y ago
  > I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with something before we release it Perhaps this is true. There can also be pain associated with shipping too early: gnarly bugs, data migrations from hell, technical debt to name a few.
jwfriese 5y ago
You say that your team should have had the willingness to ship a flawed product sooner, and that maybe that would have changed your fortunes. If you're ok with sharing, I'd be interested in learning more about why you believe that. Did you hear that from former beta customers later on down the line? Is it an intuition you have from your reflections on the period? Also, what brand of "perfectionism" are were talking about here? Chasing down minor performance boosts? Gold-plating existing features?
- davidmurdoch 5y ago
  The way I worded it was weird... we never shipped to beta, despite having 4000+ people sign up to be beta testers. We only shipped a "closed beta" (you had to ask one of the devs personally to let you in) to people in our own city. It was a location-based game (like Pokemon go), so there has to be a bunch of people in the area if your actually wanted to do anything fun. Regarding perfectionism: the game was very rough around the edges in regards to in-game assets. Performance was also a concern, both on the device and the back-end. The device could slow to 1-2 FPS if there were enough assets (100s of troops firing at once - which was easy to do with a few friends playing together at once) animating at once. The server would slow to 4s+ response times if there was enough activity in a single geographic area. I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other partners weren't.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other partners weren't." Maybe on a different timeline, you would have regretted shipping too early - because first impression matters, too and many people who walk away, after the first try will not come back for second try. The trick is, to find the right time.
    - davidmurdoch 5y ago
      Sure, hindsight is 20/20. Really though, we probably would have failed either way, mostly because we didn't know the right people.
AQuantized 5y ago
Can I ask where the capital came from? Did you all pool together to fund it? It's a lot of dedication for something that sadly didn't ship.
- davidmurdoch 5y ago
  Most was provided by a single investor, about $40k each was provided by myself and one other. Software developers are expensive
suyash 5y ago
thanks for sharing this, very important lesson indeed!
ges 5y ago
funny thing: you would be raising millions in seconds if you launched the same project and stuck the label "play-to-earn" to it today
- davidmurdoch 5y ago
  Monetization was tricky because we didn't want any pay-to-win type of gimmicks. Instead, we were planning on game customization and in-game promos for fast food places and theme parks (e.g., show up at a McDonald's and you could win something you can't get anywhere else in the game).

mysterydip 5y ago

"perfect is the enemy of good enough" I learned a few years ago. Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting as I'm working a multiplayer project right now. What was your marketing budget like? How did you get those 4000 people? Do you have a postmortem or dev log from the time?

harel 5y ago
I've seen enough failures exactly because "Perfect was the enemy of Good enough". It's a good mantra.
- typon 5y ago
  What about underpromise and overdeliver?
  - harel 5y ago
    What about it? Nobody ever complained if they were over delivered did they?
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      But in a world where hype is the standard, you will likely just get ignored, if you do not hype, but undersell your product.
- mapmap 5y ago
  The version of this phrase that I am familiar with is “perfect is the enemy of done.”
davidmurdoch 5y ago
To get the list of people: We went to a lot of indie meetups/presentations, posted all over Reddit at every opportunity (got on the front page of many gaming subreddits a bunch of times), constantly spammed our friends (there were 5 of us working on it), got involved with faculty and students at Full Sail University, anything we could. We were all very passionate about it and it pretty much consumed every waking hour of our lives; I even refinanced my home to pay for development. It was an incredibly fun endeavor... until it wasn't. Haha. We never did a post mortem because it didn't actually end... It just fizzled out (it did end some friendships though). I (lead dev and co-founder) left the project and my ownership share (after the Kickstarter failed) to the other partners; . They then tried to find someone to either buy or invest in the development of the project for a few years. I only got notice that they finally stopped paying the server bill a week or so ago. Good luck on your game endeavors!
- rootsudo 5y ago
  Is Fullsail university a good place, or a diploma mill? Their commercial spots of a decade ago made it seem 1:1 to places like Everest University or ITT Tech.
  - davidmurdoch 5y ago
    I don't know. We thought it was the best graphics school in central Florida (where I live) and we had an in with a professor there. We paid some students there for most of the 3d modeling work we needed.
marcos100 5y ago
The problem is knowing what is "good enough". It comes with experience and, if you're doing something new to you, I think it's hard to assess. You may probably tell what went in hindsight, but even then, it's just one if in the lifetime of the project. "Oh, we could've released when x was done". Maybe, but maybe not too.

kingcharles 5y ago

> Don't let perfectionism get in the way of shipping. I see this a lot. I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with something before we release it?

notreallyserio 5y ago
I think that's a big part of it. I think there's also the difference between treating something as art and something as product.
CodeWriter23 5y ago
> I wonder if a lot of creatives have obsessive personalities that cause us to want to fiddle endlessly with something before we release it Perhaps this is true. There can also be pain associated with shipping too early: gnarly bugs, data migrations from hell, technical debt to name a few.

jwfriese 5y ago

You say that your team should have had the willingness to ship a flawed product sooner, and that maybe that would have changed your fortunes. If you're ok with sharing, I'd be interested in learning more about why you believe that. Did you hear that from former beta customers later on down the line? Is it an intuition you have from your reflections on the period? Also, what brand of "perfectionism" are were talking about here? Chasing down minor performance boosts? Gold-plating existing features?

davidmurdoch 5y ago
The way I worded it was weird... we never shipped to beta, despite having 4000+ people sign up to be beta testers. We only shipped a "closed beta" (you had to ask one of the devs personally to let you in) to people in our own city. It was a location-based game (like Pokemon go), so there has to be a bunch of people in the area if your actually wanted to do anything fun. Regarding perfectionism: the game was very rough around the edges in regards to in-game assets. Performance was also a concern, both on the device and the back-end. The device could slow to 1-2 FPS if there were enough assets (100s of troops firing at once - which was easy to do with a few friends playing together at once) animating at once. The server would slow to 4s+ response times if there was enough activity in a single geographic area. I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other partners weren't.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "I was okay with shipping with these issues, but the other partners weren't." Maybe on a different timeline, you would have regretted shipping too early - because first impression matters, too and many people who walk away, after the first try will not come back for second try. The trick is, to find the right time.
  - davidmurdoch 5y ago
    Sure, hindsight is 20/20. Really though, we probably would have failed either way, mostly because we didn't know the right people.

AQuantized 5y ago

Can I ask where the capital came from? Did you all pool together to fund it? It's a lot of dedication for something that sadly didn't ship.

davidmurdoch 5y ago
Most was provided by a single investor, about $40k each was provided by myself and one other. Software developers are expensive

suyash 5y ago

thanks for sharing this, very important lesson indeed!

ges 5y ago

funny thing: you would be raising millions in seconds if you launched the same project and stuck the label "play-to-earn" to it today

davidmurdoch 5y ago
Monetization was tricky because we didn't want any pay-to-win type of gimmicks. Instead, we were planning on game customization and in-game promos for fast food places and theme parks (e.g., show up at a McDonald's and you could win something you can't get anywhere else in the game).