Incredible quality! I also expected a time lapse, but the variety and consistency while maintaining beautiful composition & colour is truly impressive.
Great to see more support for Godot! The lead VC and the company pledges bode well for keeping the bulk of the new tech open I think.
Biggest red flag is the lack of anyone with games pedigree. If the goal is to crack the duopoly with a great FOSS engine supported by paid BaaS + enterprise support plans, you’re going to need strong connections, partners, and knowledge of the real product requirements. First sales will be pretty challenging, but if they can get traction and ship great games there’s certainly an opportunity
How have you communicated your cap table and investment activities to the lead? Does the lead want the whole round? Did the higher valuation come from the lead or you? Provided you aren’t trying to shift their stake or acted as n bad faith, a reasonable VC should be fine with adding valuable people to help the company.
SAFE that basically auto executes sounds like a strong option to me
Tough situation, clearly lots of emotions which is understandable. As others mention, startups are high risk, don’t let cofounders manipulate your thinking on that.
Re:launch cost & funding, I’d ask if you actually need that money. Can you get any customers with what you have? Investors are spoiled for choice, and can afford to make startups hit higher burden of proof before funding. Regardless of market challenges, showing sales & fit is a big deal. Getting that could change your fortunes.
If you do shut down, take pride in what you tried to do. Be sure to do a post mortem and take the learnings with you in your career. Startup or not, you’ve done something very hard that very few try. It will serves you well as n future work
I agree the first two points are more about understanding trade-offs - but the result is still focus. Overall I thinks it’s a good articles about achieving goals. Focus can be an overused word, but still works well here IMO
If your org is 10 moving to 50 in a few months then you have a BIG change ahead. The good news is that you are responsible for how your team operates. You've identified problems, and now you get to fix them - not by coding, but through leadership & culture. This isn't to say it's easy, it's a massive challenge, but it is yours to solve and does require technical knowledge and skill.
No first time CTO's had it figured out either - continue to show the courage to ask advice (as you've done here) and figure it out bit by bit. Nobody has made your org before - there's no playbook only prior work.
The flip side is if that is of zero interest, you're likely in the wrong role. No shame, depends what motivates you.
Absolutely, I hope we get to hear the story at some point - so much bad blood between AL and IS. With this proposal coming on the day of Unity's shareholder meeting, and sending weak signals about AppLovin's outlook, it's such a weird play. I'm too much of a rube to know if it's brilliant or desperate, but I'm sure it's a good story regardless
A four month old company worth 4B would feel like an invincible rocket ship. Hard to be rational in that case. I’m sure they told themselves the story of Facebook turning down the 1B acquisition way back and saw themselves with the better story
Waterloo region is building density, despite complaints (1), because there’s no supply. People claim to want all of: affordable housing, no sprawl, no community impact - but that’s not possible. Glad they prioritized units, although a lot are still condos which are not quite ‘affordable’, but the supply will help
Advice and rules rarely seem to apply anything but pressure to parents. The real solve is building connection to and understanding of your children. Likely this won’t come from a template - although it can be a good framework to understand the possibility space and have ideas. Expect to try variations, and don’t ignore the pressure of ‘perfection’.
The only statement I’ve found true is: Whatever is hard now will go away - but it will be replaced with something harder. Parenting is a grind. Love your kids especially when it’s hard, learn your emotional responses and hang ups, let go of perfect.
It’s amazing how much pressure first time parents can put on themselves. The number of expectations is insane and impossible, and makes an already stressful situation worse.
Our first was difficult as well and advice never really applied. As a baby heavy metal actually worked well, which horrified my mother - but it’s all about finding something that works to calm them.
Great closing sentiment, so I’ll paraphrase: it will be hard to love your child sometimes. Love them always, keep them safe, treat them well, and show them the beauty in the world. What seems hard will get easier.
This is a really important point - your own mental state is so crucial. Kids are hard, they can’t communicate well (or at all), and it’s the parent's job to figure out. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and consumed with emotions. Being ok with taking a break given everyone is safe helps rebuild energy and perspective.
Especially true for new parents - after the first you become more intuitive and understand the grind.
Well executed unique approach, great job! I’ve worked in games my whole life, and that’s hard to do!
Like others, I personally don’t like the time pressure and have really enjoyed the async one a day whenever format of wordle. It largely depends on your target audience and objectives for whether it’s right for this game. Separate zen/challenge modes would help players self select, but also muddies the onboarding. Great job though, fun game!
Good question! Cider is unfiltered and cloudy, and gets a rich brown colour from the pulp sediment. Apple juice is totally clear, and has been strained of all sediment.
As others mention hard cider is alcoholic, but most people just overload and use cider, and distinguish by context - which isn’t helpful. You can make hard cider from juice or cider, the flavour will differ, but it the name. However, most commercial cider is just flavoured malt liquor - which also gets the same name, so ingredient checking is important!
Totally agree - the definition of done is really hard in creative work. Having a culture of refinement with the courage to ship early and often is a powerful tool to hone in on great results
Oh wow, yeah my first mobile game studio had a huge industrial fastener shelf with little drawers stuffed with different phones. We started in 2004, and feature phone game dev was indeed wild. We did a lot of WWE games in 2d and 3d, needing ~15 different reference builds ranging from 64k 2d builds to 800k 3d for high end, plus another set for all the BREW devices. Managing code, asset pipelines, and qa across high/med/low 2d/3d Java/cpp permutations was a huge challenge, but it was so satisfying to be good at. I love what mobile has turned into, and never want to debug another random c crash on device ever again, but I do miss the cabinet of phones and all the crazy variation