The Battle for Perfection
Back in 2014 when we have just started our company, we worked on a fun game project, which we’ve never published. Now, looking back we ask ourselves, why not?
It’s 2013. We are starting our company, looking for office space. Via Facebook (which wasn’t a monster back then), we stumble on Ad for a place called Commodore Room. Craig Judkins, the creator of the space, welcomes us with a drink for an interview. The place had a look of a 60ies New York Oase in the downtown of Karlsruhe. We have a nice chat about life, client-work, web-design and a bit of music. Contract signed. The new chapter begins.
Finally, we could allow ourselves to accomplish side projects during work time, which was one of the reasons why we started our company in the first place.
Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down. — Ray Bradbury
Build little projects, not spending too much time on them, publishing them, and maybe one of the potential clients will discover us and would want to adopt those ideas for their project. That was our idea for strategy as a newly born agency.
One of the projects was the Battle of Commodores. A game originally inspired by Battleships, a game I loved to play as a child against my older sister. We were using at that time a new technology web-sockets, which allows to build a real-time web applications. In a relatively short period, we have finished the first version of the game, which we actually enjoyed playing ourselves against each other.
Release time…
But when it came to the point of release, that’s when our imposter syndrome kicked in. We did several iterations of improvements but then another client project came in, and the game got eventually forgotten.
The biggest unproductivity is not using the time to the maximum, but abandoning the direction you were going to. Still, we have learned some new skills and got even more experienced in what we do.
Our own advice to ourselves back then would be: don’t be afraid to publish something even it’s not perfect yet. Probably people won’t even know of your high expectations and would love to see what you’ve got anyway. It’s just an experiment.
Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. — Winston Churchill
The Battle of Commodores has yet not been published until today. But we’ve learned from it, and were less perfectionist on other side projects like DÆSK Time-Tracker or Let’s Eat Somewhere, which even won honourable awards.
Feel free to check it out, and let us know what do you think!
Link to the Game: Battle of Commodores
