Growing is hard. In the beginning, you sort of run straight ahead as fast as you can pausing to make minor adjustments and learning a lot along the way. It’s a lot of fun making up everything and you’re starting with a clean slate so you don’t have to worry about bumping into too many walls. When you’re working on cool stuff like us, you get a lot of positive energy when you’re showing off the product to your friends, early beta testers or whoever (people tend to get excited talking about games even if they aren’t players). There’s no legacy code, there aren’t any customers to worry about, there are very few people to keep track of and very little “management” overhead. However with a little luck and a great product things can start to get complicated very quickly and you’ve no choice to but to start growing (which is really hard just in case I didn’t mention that). It’s hard because no matter what you’ve done (no matter how big), people have bigger expectations. It’s hard because it’s hard to find good people (and as everyone who’s an A player knows - A players hire A players). It’s hard because compromising is difficult and you can’t progress without compromise. And it’s hard because you have to start planning instead of doing all the time and if you work for a start-up, doing is one of the things you enjoy most.

Planning is an item that’s taken a bit of a back seat for us but we’re actively trying to get better at it (and that basically means I’m trying to put together what we’re working on over the next few months). It’s not so much a foreign concept as it is just one that’s been in the back of the closet long enough that it’s a little dusty and seeing it reminds me that I didn’t actually take it to Goodwill and drop it off. Time to get it out, make sure it still fits, perhaps toss it in the washing machine and put it on.

The executive summary of this post is that I’m working on putting together a plan that involves monthly updates (we’ll still do the weekly patches when we need to). The goal being to communicate the up and coming exciting stuff that’s going on with Duels and even collect some feedback so we can alter our course if it’s way off. Here’s an idea of what’s coming in the next couple of months. There are some growing pains as we get bigger but we are definitely getting better.