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So, how are Things lately?
Things are great here! Bek and I have a pretty charmed life: a roof over our heads, a couple adorable kids, and we’re still working for ourselves somehow. We had some unexpected successes especially in 2008 and 2009 and for the most part we used that momentum to do some cool things. We put out award-winning games and put some stuff in some museums and made some new friends. We took some family vacations and quality time on a pretty regular basis. We’ve probably had more high points in the last 5-10 years than most. We work hard and we’re very lucky, which is a pretty strong combo. Our two keystone Finji projects right now (Overland and Night in the Woods) are turning out better than we ever hoped. They’re the kinds of things I always dreamed we could work on.
But…
Running your own game company and raising some kids is not… without challenges. I think the fact that Bek and I tend to be pretty upbeat and excited about our work might be … painting a slightly misleading picture about how intense day to day life can be in our position. That doesn’t mean we’d trade it for anything, just… I dunno, a little “real talk” now and then never hurts, I guess.
And this may … well, I think it can be tempting sometimes to look at social media and be like “hey things seem to be going ok for that person and their life choices” and that may be right or wrong, but it’s almost definitely an incomplete picture.
So here’s a more complete version of our picture.
I don’t have a lot of regrets, but sometimes the path we’ve chosen is pretty fucking rocky.
In 2013 we were entangled in a malicious and toxic work-related legal battle. It was devastating. It was physically, emotionally, and financially costly. Just the opportunity cost was immeasurable (I’ve tried to make some estimates, but it’s imaginary numbers - a quarter million maybe?). But there were actual cash expenses too, arrangements that felt to us like extortion. This lasted most of the year, and started within months of our second child’s birth, compounding the stress and anxiety. I could fairly describe this period as ‘a struggle’. It had qualities of the slowly boiling a frog thing - I had no idea how bad things were until they started to get better. Which they did. At great expense.
Lesson learned, I guess.
(A quick aside: I can’t count the number of people I know in the game industry who have gone through “one of those”. Nobody talks about it for a million good reasons. Just… for the sake of whatever, if you’re talking to someone in the industry, probably just assume that they’ve done this at least once. How messed up is that??)
Anyways, fast-forward: Overland and Night in the Woods have been works in progress for more than two years. That’s not easy to fund - an enormous amount of contract work, nights and weekends, bootstrapped a lot of that development. I wrote about the Overland version of this recently. NITW was also crowdfunded, and we’ve taken on some substantial (but reasonable) loans to make sure we can safely fund these games to completion. That’s new territory for us - we’ve been bootstrapped since 2006. I’m a big fan of biting off more than one can chew, I think that’s how people grow, but man alive. These projects are massive. Fantastic, and peerless in important ways that really matter, but yea… massive.
These are the right calls for these projects, too. They’re going to pay off. Probably in a big way. But it’s a lot of plates to spin!
(Oh yeah, and somewhere in there GamerGate happened, devastating our friends and half our network of developers, and making us question a thousand dumb assumptions about security and social media and sexism. We got off light, and only had to block a few thousand sock puppets from the PC Master Race reddit. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger I guess)
Making a new game from scratch that breaks a lot of rules means not every penny is spent perfectly. It all adds up to that special new thing you’re making, but looking back, it’s hard not to see some of the costly dead ends: a 9-month game abandoned, bad contractors chewing up budget without really putting out, missed opportunities, the meta-failure of being so swamped that it starts to mess with your planning and judgment causing a kind of positive feedback loop of negative consequences… these things have a tendency to cascade, and then there’s the frog-boiling thing again.
I guess what I’m trying to say is the now, the last month or so, the last week, the last day, these are all built on these last few years, which have been fucking nuts. We’ve done big projects before, we’ve worked some crazy schedules, we’ve taken on more than we thought we could handle… all of that pales in comparison to this last chapter. Finji, the company, the job, the family, has been and continues to be an utterly colossal undertaking.
Just in the last month, just at Finji, we have been riding a roller coaster of funding, workflows, major awards, PR, and legal issues on top of the normal day-to-day operations of designing and programming big-ass PC/console games. It’s actually been a very positive month with a ton of progress - it’s not so much a question of good vs bad as overwhelming vs not. And it’s been pretty overwhelming!
At home, we’re trying to figure out what kindergartens we want to put our oldest in, making sure our younger one can get into the amazing preschool the older one attended, managing all the weird things that every parent manages every day, the unpredictable emergence of the weird roommates that are our children.
And since that’s not enough, we’re also in the process of selling our current house and moving into something smaller and more sustainable, using the equity we built up in our current house to help fund the completion of our games this year. While doing all that Finji stuff.
I’m not sure if you, reader, have ever sold our bought a house, but it’s a substantial project in its own right. And selling and buying houses when you have two kids under the age of 5 is a whole other thing. Doing this in the current Austin housing market… well, if my luscious mane of thick auburn hair is mostly white next year, you’ll know why.
Oh, and various pets and family members are getting surgery this week.
So, how are Things lately?
Everything is insane. The RNG around here is ruining this speedrun. And I love it! I love a challenge, I’m so so so proud of Finji and all our developers, I’m so proud of Bek, I’m so thankful that our families have been supportive of our efforts. I literally don’t have words for how proud I am of Overland team, which is 80% women who have never shipped a game before. Yeah, fuck you too, game industry!! When I say we’re doing pretty great, it’s because we’re doing pretty great. We’re building something I’ve dreamed of building for my whole life. Who gets to say that? Who gets to do that? And it’s turning out amazing! I am literally a unicorn with a rainbow perpetually shining on it.
But I miss our friends, who we rarely see. I miss watching movies. I miss reading. I miss traveling, sometimes. We had to skip an all-expenses trip to Spain this year because of our schedule. Actually, forget that, I miss just leaving the house sometimes. That goes like quadruple for Bek, I’m pretty sure. I really wanna play some Magic, and run more, and get back into rock climbing, and take a fucking break once in a while. So I’m looking forward to the next plateau. It might take a year but I know we’ll get there.
Until then, we’ll be here, sorting out contracts, fixing bugs, potty-training, stepping on Duplo, updating build scripts, validating animations, making dinner, doing laundry, adding new features, and sometimes sneaking in an episode of iZombie. And hey, if you’re in town, come crash on our couch, we have whiskey <3