Pride, Ignorance and Lag of focus
While FRVR is now showing the first signs of becoming an actual success, I don't feel that I have been as honest about the process as I originally set out to be. Writing about my failures is hard and I find that even with a conscious effort I simply glance over my missteps in footnotes.
When I first started out, I had planned to do monthly reviews of my work and progress. However it was not before this weekend, while reviewing my previous posts to see if I made promises about content I had not upheld, I realize that it’s been more than half a year without any introspection.
So let’s take a look at how I failed the past half year, trying to understand why.
Pride
I have worked in the games industry for more than 15 years and constantly fall into the trap of thinking I know better. The truth is that the games industry moves so fast, that most experience older than a few years, simply no longer apply. Even worse I make decisions that I know are wrong when I make them, blindly forging ahead regardless.
A great example of this was my insistence on writing my own game engine early on. Something I should never do as people more clever than me do it better, becoming a constant sink of work hours much better spend on actually working on games.
looking back at my previous posts (#1, #2, #3) it’s clear that I even took pride in the fact that I was writing my own engine, even though I was fully aware that it was not the right decision going as far as advising others against it.
In the end it took me 5 months to man up and take my own advice and switch to pixi.js for my underlying render engine.
Unfortunately I have been very good at tracking my work hours, allowing me to determine that writing my own engine was a mistake costing a whopping $35200 dollars -- Never again!
Ignorance
While pride is by far my biggest vice it get’s even worse when I mix it with ignorance. With expert knowledge no more than a google search away, I still find myself assuming that I know what to do, completely neglecting to do any research.
For instance, simply clicking the first result on a subdomains vs subfolders google search would have told me to go with subfolders rather than subdomains for FRVR, as the plan is to release multiple games. Regardless I chose to release Solitaire FRVR on solitaire.frvr.com a mistake I only just corrected last week when I realised that the inconsistancy I was seeing in Google and Bing webmaster tools where due to solitaire.frvr.com and frvr.com competing for the same keywrods.
While I did my very best to patch the issue with a well implemented 301 permanent redirect, it’s very likely that I completely lost out on half a years worth of SEO. Not good when I expect a major source of traffic to be search based.
Lag of focus
I can put an endless amount of hours into FRVR. Especially now where numbers are trending in the right direction and I have the first apps live in stores with actual monetization.
However, looking at the past week, I did not accomplish a lot as I seem to have put all my focus into distribution. Looking back, this seems to be a trend with more than $10000 worth of hours having been spend on marketing.
So far I have been convincing myself that FRVR is as much about the marketing strategy, monetization and other aspects that makes a game successful as it is about making great games. And while it’s true that marketing is where I should be putting the majority of my focus in the long run, I have not been owning up to the fact, that all I have is a well implemented minimal viable product.
Even worse is that I did a good job of instrumenting the game with analytics, giving me great insights into what works and what does not. I spend a lot of time looking at the data and writing todo tasks to tweak and update Solitaire FRVR to take it from MVP to a great game.
With all that, I still spend the majority of the hours last week working on marketing -- a mostly pointless effort as the game is barely good enough to send to users.
So let’s try again
Trying to be actional on my previous failures I therefore spend a few hours today reordered my todo list into prioritized must haves and nice to haves with a fixed research process. Promising myself that I will not work on a single nice to have until the last must have checked.
And while sticking to a strict plan will feel exactly like work, I hope to not break my own promises to myself until I have a substantially better game on my hands.