I learned so much from entering the gaming industry. Even though I had made games before, I never did it professionally until I worked on Athena Crisis. Beyond creating the game itself, I was most interested in learning how to build and market a game. There were many things that went great, but also a lot of things that didn’t (including the time a Romanian pixel artist tried to extort me - a story for another time).
For one, marketing went poorly. Signing with a publisher was awesome as they took care of much of the marketing efforts, but given that they were a new publisher, they hadn’t built out their processes and industry reach. I’m not blaming them - I knew about it upfront, and they did a great job with what they had available. I’m mostly reflecting on my own ability to market Athena Crisis. What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that selling an entertainment product is completely different from marketing a developer tool or other software.
While I love being open, the gaming industry works the opposite way. In gaming, it’s best to hide as much as possible until launch and focus exclusively on generating hype and selling an experience that might not even exist by the time you go out and talk to users (unfortunately, many games fail to actually ship the experience they promised). Instead, I deliberately open sourced the game before launch and shared the game’s current state throughout development.
There were other things that I strongly believed in that ran counter to players’ expectations. For example, I shipped new versions of the game up to ten times a day. Many players were annoyed that the game updated (and shipped free new features!) every day.
Yet another “issue” was that I focused too much on loading times. Athena Crisis starts in about a second – unlike most other video games that take 10+ seconds and show a bunch of logos each time you start them. Instead of giving people the feeling that this game was hyper-optimized for performance, it gave some people the impression that it was cheap – how good could a game really be when it doesn’t spend a lot of time loading assets into memory?
True to my uncompromising nature, I will never overpromise and underdeliver – but I would do things differently next time. I learned a lot.