When we know we are surrounded by the right people… a personal experience.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is intended to help anyone, who is in a similar situation we are in at the moment. Everyone has to make their own decisions. This merely is our own honest view and opinion, based on our experience. We would love to hear from you, what you think about it all. We wish you all the success and fun you deserve with the development and release of your game! eXplore Studio

As the time to release our first indie game was fast approaching, we looked at our backlog of issues and realised that, beyond what we had expected, there were still some tough bugs to fix, some code to fine-tune, some new elements of features to be added to the game, lots of quality assurance tests to run… in reality, too many things to achieve for a small team in a short period of time!

Feelings of frustration and stress were on the rise, and everyone definitely felt a bit overwhelmed. It was time to take the right decisions to protect our well-being. Physical health and mental health are at the heart of our game studio’s mission, so we decided to move our release date several times to protect the team by giving enough time for people to sort out the issues we were still facing in the game... Moreover, we take great pride in the game we are developing, and we would certainly not want to release it unfinished or not at the right level of quality.

Also, we decided to approach and tackle some of the major problems slightly differently. We all decided to go out of our comfort zone and support one another in domains we are not necessarily comfortable or familiar with. For instance, the operations manager ended up looking at coding issues with the game designer and I am pleased to report that two pairs of eyes and the extra hours paid off! With another team member, I changed gear and helped create some GIFs that were missing in some parts of the game. It took us longer than we had expected!

Now, thinking back about this stressful time, I do not recall the hours we put into it, the necessary learning and the unavoidable mistakes and failures that come with it, the accumulated fatigue due to lack of sleep. Instead, I remember the supportive, kind, and caring team we have, people who look out for one another and take time to check how everyone feels despite whatever else they may have to deal with. A short text message here and there, a smiley face, a Zoom call, all of this can really change our perspective and feelings. There is always some joy in the most difficult and challenging moments, even if it’s just a tiny glimmer of joy… When we are surrounded by the right people, we know we can accomplish so much more than we ever could alone. Choose your team well, value them, take care of one another, and be kind to yourself and to others.