Note: I actually wrote this around December 2014, but I never posted it (for some reason), so it’s actually kind of old.. haha. But after re-reading it today I figured that people might care about it:)
It’s been a while since I wrote about our ‘start-up life’ as Duckbridge. We started around 3-4 months ago, when we quit our jobs and started working fulltime on Duckbridge (and our first full-time title : Luckslinger).
Most of our time up untill now we’ve spend just developing the game and promoting it at some events and whatnot. The development of the game has gone pretty well so far and we’re planning to go on Greenlight & Kickstarter soon.
Anyways, this post is not about our game, but more about the ‘independent developer life’. In earlier posts I described how great it was to start your own game company and that it’s awesome and all that and it still is. However, the further you get into the development process the more ‘stress’ seems to surface. I’m not talking about regular work stress or anything like that, I’m talking about some kind of ‘fear’ stress. Fears for the game which turn into stress. One moment you can feel super good about the game and the other you feel like it’s all going to fail.
It sounds like a super negative thought, but it’s something that is constantly on my mind, whenever I read about other games or even think about our upcoming kickstarter/greenlight, the ‘stress’ crawls right back and really makes me worried about everything. The way that I deal with it thus far is just by working on stuff (the game or kickstarter preparation etc.)
It’s really strange, because sometimes Donald and I are discussing the kickstarter/greenlight and I feel really confident about it and then later that feeling is instantly turned around.. It seems that it has something to do with my mood though. When I’m feeling good I don’t have these ‘negative’ thoughts, but when I don’t .. It really sucks, haha.
Usually the best remedy for this kind of fear is distraction, even showering helps a lot in the process. I think the stress doesn’t surface because I lost hope for the game or whatnot, because I think that the game is really awesome. But I cannot help but think that it MIGHT fail.. I cannot help myself from thinking of the ‘what if’ situation. And eventhough we’ve covered most of the ‘fail’ scenario’s that I came up with.. It’s still impossible to not stress about it.
It’s a really weird phase in development. Because we’ve had a lot of good feedback on the game and we have confidence that it’s a good game, but it’s just this fear of not knowing what’s to come that keeps coming back.
