What went wrong
Poor budget planning
As I hinted at above, we were in a financial mess when we started development of Great Little War Game. Not only did we not have a budget for the development itself, we actually owed other people money, mainly the tax man. I’ll bet not many developers start a project with negative capital!
So we did what we had to do, decided to get hung for a sheep instead of a lamb and went further into debt. Our company wasn’t worth a dime as collateral for a loan, so this involved us staking our very livelihoods on the line by remortgaging our homes. That’s not to be recommended and is hardly sound business advice, but it certainly brings a level of focus that you can’t get any other way!
I’d make a clichéd analogy about a tightrope walker without a safety net at this point, but a more accurate description would involve also throwing away the balance beam and the tightrope!
So, that’s us — we at least had what we thought was enough money to get the game done and dived right in to make it happen. We all had a very clear vision of what we were making and things went fine for a while, but by the time we got to halfway through our budget, we realized we’d not gotten halfway through the development.
Due to how we got the first lot, there was going to be no more money, period. That led to a few crisis meetings where the inevitable decision finally got taken – cut unstarted features, rush the remainder, and just ship the game before we all starve. This is never a good thing, but it was a double blow for us because one of the reasons we wanted to go full indie was to get away from compromising our creations and doing silly crunch development at the end.
Buggy, rushed launch
Leading on from the above panic sprint finish, I’m sure it will come as no surprise that the game we initially shipped had almost no QA (Quality Assurance) work done and was therefore extremely buggy. Even our Apple feature became a double-edged sword because the public was buying the game in droves, which meant a day or so later all the Internet forums started lighting up with delightful stories about what a crap game we’d made.
And there were some real howlers in there, too, things you’d think the developers should spot even without a dedicated QA focus. Like the fact that the only iPad the game ran on was ours. Or the fact that you had to do level five in one sitting else it would autosave itself with an immovable obstacle stuck in your path.
These were not good times, especially for someone like myself with decades of experience making games. Of course with the beauty of digital distribution, we got all of this stuff fixed and updated in fairly short order, but the damage to our reputation had been done. We looked like rank amateurs.
We’d also made another fatal mistake related to the product launch and that was not budgeting any time or money to do some marketing. Even when we acknowledged that the pot was running dry, that budget was always designed to last just until we pressed the button on the store.
We should have been pushing the game in the press and forums and such long before we shipped it, but we just didn’t have the time. After shipping, when some advertising might have helped, we didn’t have the money. In fact it’s fair to say that Great Little War Game wasn’t actually launched at all but simply cut loose.
No multiplayer
This one isn’t really a mistake of its own because when we got to that feature-cutting stage, this is the main one we had to cut. We did so because it just wasn’t physically possible to get it done in time, even if we stopped everything else, so it was never going to happen whether we wanted it to or not.
But having said that, you can’t release a war game with no online component, either. People expect it, and we doubtless lost a lot of sales because we didn’t provide it.
We actually started adding this back in for our first big product update, but it got so complicated with needing our own cross-platform servers and such,that we took the decision to save it for the sequel and a fresh budget – more on that next week.