For the love of Lumote, getting back up when you don’t succeed
As you may have seen we’ve gotten funding from Creative BC, huzzah! You probably also notice that the time between our this post and our last one is almost a year old. The truth is we derailed for a while, last summer we submitted to be part of the Indie Megabooth at PAX and failed. It was pretty demoralizing.
After Pax, we went through a moment that I think all Indies go through where they wonder if they’re ever going to finish. You’ve been working so hard for so long just to look up and realize there still an immense amount of work still to do. The thing was we still loved the concept of Lumote, but had been working on it for two years. What did we need to do to actually ship.
We took some time to rethink what we were doing. One of the things that really helped was we started having meetings about Lumote again. We talked over arching gameplay and individually what our expectations were. We narrowed in on our weak points, for example we had great tech but little content and some enemy types were pretty jank in moments of gameplay. For working on Lumote so long, the world was still pretty undefined.
We rescheduled ourselves and broke the project down into manageable chunks for the amount of time we wanted to keep working on Lumote. We were getting back on track but still unsure. We decided to apply for Creative BC, to see if we could convey to an outside organisation what made Lumote great and on track to actually succeed, which is what we failed to do with PAX. Because at the end of the day we are building a game and if we can’t convince people that it’s great and worth playing we’re not succeeding.
Luckily we did get funding, external validation! If we hadn’t gotten the funding, I think we would still be making Lumote. It would definitely have been a big blow and made us take an even bigger step back, but we would still be making Lumote. I think that’s important to the progress of making a game. When you stall or things don’t go well, to take some time and think. Why did people not like this and how do I improve. While the funding is great, I also think it’s good that we now have to be kept accountable by something other than ourselves. This has pushed us to finish a bunch of paperwork that was long overdue. Plus we have added incentive to stay focus on meeting our deliverables for Creative BC and hopefully to anyone who’s actually reading this and thinks Lumote is great enough to follow along.
If you did want to follow the progress of Lumote more we’re on Twitter, Facbook and check back here on our website!
To read more about Creative BC go here!