A week has gone by since the launch of Brainsss.  It’s been a wild ride as expected.  We’ve had the highs of being featured by Apple and getting to 17th or so on the iPad charts to the lows of selling far below expectations.  There was a night of scrambling when we found out some people bought the game when their device wasn’t supported.  Then there were the positive reviews from customers who genuinely loved the game.

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Have you ever had somebody start talking to you, and you just have no idea what they’re talking about?  Like the words aren’t meant for you, they’re meant for the wall behind you.

Sometimes Rod gets all excited and wants to show me what he’s been working on.  Its really cool when he’s showing off a new feature, but sometimes… just sometimes, he starts showing me code.

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I always am a bit weary of outsourcing work to contractors.  Maybe it’s because I’m self conscious that my own job is at stake, but I just don’t like the idea of not working in house.  The reasons are obvious, miscommunication and turn around time.  It’s much easier to communicate what I need in person, and if there are any issues that arise, I can answer them very quickly.  Also brainstorming is very difficult to do when it’s not in house because there isn’t the free flow of ideas that can happen in a room.

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Ownership is quite a difficult task on group projects.  As important as it is to empower people, ownership can be a destructive force.  Even when one person is credited for a task, where many of the creative solutions for that task can be easily forgotten over months of development.  It got to thinking about the creative process of coming up with ideas and how lucid it can be.

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I’m use to traditional development.  You work on the project, you finish, go to sleep, and hopefully you’ve made some sales when you’ve woken up.

I’ve been thinking how Brainsss will end up being a constant work in progress like many of the newer generation of games.  It puts much less pressure on the initial launch, but when do you sleep?  I’m fine now, but at some point I’m going to be totally burned out on this project.  Ready to move on.  But that’s just not possible when the project is in a constant state of development.

This worries me a bit, because as a developing IP, you want to keep building on the property.  Make it bigger and better, and if you move onto something else before you’ve reach the properties full potential, you’ve wasted all that time to develop the game.

The reason why is that the initial amount of work to develop a game is much more substantial than maintaining it.  So in theory, a developer should constantly work on the game until it has reached it’s maximum potential.  But this doesn’t take into account that we’re human and not machines.  Humans get tired of working on the same thing day in and day out.  This is why Rod and I started up Lonely Few in the first place.  We didn’t want to get stuck in the long development cycles of big budget titles.

But with soft launches, you are no longer in a long development cycle, you’re in an endless development cycle.  This scares me a bit.  It doesn’t look like Rod or I will be able to take a vacation anytime soon.