While the summer in Finland is short and usually contains more sun and warm weather than the other seasons [sic], other stuff than entrepreneurial mongering within closed walls is bound to happen. There’s a lot of sunlight during June, July, and August, which makes socializing outside much more fun.

My first game release, Oggipital, was on June 6th, right in the beginning of the summer. After that it’s been quite slow on the blogging side, well, mostly because it’s been slow on the game development side. There’s something cooking, don’t worry, but the progress hasn’t been as fast as I would’ve hoped. There’s two contributing factors to the slowness:

1. Post-Release Hangover. Not particular to game development, it’s a common thing for any project you finish – you get that “finally it’s finished, I have no energy nor interest left to push any related issues forward right now”. Perhaps the best example is graduation from school: the month following the graduation is seldom a high-energy one.
2.  A little known fact outside the game development community, but releasing a game does certainly not mean that the work on the game is done. Quite the contrary – you need to do marketing and sales follow ups, fix bugs real users might have reported, you want to start implementing those new awesome features, plan that next update. So, starting another game development project means that you now have TWO projects going on at the same thing. Which essentially halves your throughput.

I’ve overcome the first point already, I’ve kicked off Pixelem, the next game. Coding notwithstanding, it progresses quite good on the art and audio side, thanks to my awesome subcontractors. But I’m still struggling with point 2 – I have not only two, but three projects going on a the same time, on top of the general entrepreneurial stuff one needs to do to keep things rolling.

Well, my good old 1200-step life improvement plan to the rescue! There’s one point on it I had neglected – the “staying fit” part. It’s funny how quickly one forgets how much good one gets from getting out of the office and do some sports. So I threw my jogging shoes on and went out in the awesome weather. Bam, back in business!