Chalk It Up To Experience

Yes, I know.

I know.

I was supposed to be keeping a regular posting schedule.

So much for that. I had good intentions, but then something big happened, and my attention drifted for a while there.

What happened? Well, I almost signed a publisher deal with one of those indie publishing labels. Almost.

I was keeping mum until everything was signed on the dotted line, but I was bursting to talk about it the whole while.

The really exciting part was that it would have given me the resources (read: money) to upgrade my plans for Cults – add more graphical whizz-bang, more cards, more content and more professional polish. And actually be able to hire on some other devs to help me with all that.

System Crash, much as I poured my heart and soul into it, I couldn’t afford to add everything I would have liked to add, polish it as much as I would have liked to polish it. There came a point where I just had to release it.

They say creative projects are never finished, merely abandoned, and that’s certainly true of my experience so far.

So I had it all planned out, an expanded roadmap for Cults with a realistic (I believe) budget, things were looking good…but then, unfortunately, it all fell apart at the last moment.

I’ve signed an NDA, so I can’t go into any detail. But, yeah. It didn’t work out.

A pity. I can’t say I’m not disappointed, the expanded plan was exciting. And I lost the time I invested in the negotiation, building out said upgraded production plan, etc. More than that, I (possibly foolishly) decided to go ahead with some refactoring I’d been wanting to do but been putting off for lack of time.

With negotiations getting to the point where it was looking fairly likely that other people would be working in the code base soon, and thinking that cleaning up the code would make it easier to implement the planned expanded feature set, I decided to take the gamble and go ahead with it.

That gamble didn’t work out, and it ended up costing me a month of dev time, overall.

Now that the deal has fallen through, I’m a bit regretful of that lost time. It’s still much nicer to work in the codebase, now, and the code had needed that restructure for a while, there was a constant annoyance when I was adding new features. So maybe in the long run, even for this version of Cults, it will be worth it.

But it’s a still a month of lost time to make up, my budget can’t easily swallow the loss, and I can’t be certain it was worth doing, now.

Ah well, hindsight is 50/50, right? This is the life of an entrepreneur – very much the captain of a small ship sailing into unknown, dangerous waters, hoping not to navigate in the wrong direction and run out of supplies, or be dashed against rocks.

I’m chalking this all up to, as the post title says, experience. If nothing else, I took away some important lessons from this whole thing, and gained some insight. I might even have leveled up a stat or two.

Real Life, the RPG! 😉

-Gareth out