AD
Excitign and tough times ahead!
Honestly, designing, illustrating, and writing are our main gigs, but stepping out of my comfort zone to handle everything else needed to bring this game to life is a whole different ballgame!
I'll step back and layer two things: the Dunning-Kruger Effect curve and our design and development timeline, starting from December 2019. This should give you a big-picture view of how I've been feeling throughout the project. 😁
As you can see, everything kicked off smoothly. We were on a roll, making progress and having a blast as we kept improving things over the years. We never really felt any pressure or urgency. We always talked about eventually needing to settle down, stop tweaking, and focus on the next steps, like thinking about releasing the game. We hadn't even started planning any campaigns, whether for marketing or crowdfunding, because, you know, real artists ship, right?...
So, around the start of 2024, we decided to put an end to the "fun" stuff, for lack of a better term, and said, "Alright, time to step up and act like a legit game studio." Maybe not in those exact words, but you get the idea. That's when reality kicked in, and we started feeling a bit lost, kind of like a frog in slowly boiling water... Okay, maybe that's a bit dramatic. We never got that desperate or lost, or felt like our bottoms were literally burning, but things got serious, and they got serious fast! We had to deal with factories, marketing campaigns, building an audience, production costs, packaging, shipping, and fulfillment, not to mention all the stuff with tariffs...
But not all is grim! We have made it out of the deep end, or at least that's how we feel like. We are definitely starting to see the light at the end of the Slope of Enlightenment, unless that's another light we are seeing at then end of another tunnel 😇. Joking aside, we're untying these knots as we go, one by one, partly thanks to a few great partners and partly due to stubbornness and determination. It is after all true that the last 10% takes you 90% of your time to see the finish line.
Bonus Content:
Here's also a breakdown of where we are with everything we're doing internally and externally... so yeah it is a lot!
Until next time,
AD.