"perfect is the enemy of good enough" I learned a few years ago. Thanks for sharing, this is really interesting as I'm working a multiplayer project right now. What was your marketing budget like? How did you get those 4000 people? Do you have a postmortem or dev log from the time?
To get the list of people: We went to a lot of indie meetups/presentations, posted all over Reddit at every opportunity (got on the front page of many gaming subreddits a bunch of times), constantly spammed our friends (there were 5 of us working on it), got involved with faculty and students at Full Sail University, anything we could. We were all very passionate about it and it pretty much consumed every waking hour of our lives; I even refinanced my home to pay for development.
It was an incredibly fun endeavor... until it wasn't. Haha.
We never did a post mortem because it didn't actually end... It just fizzled out (it did end some friendships though). I (lead dev and co-founder) left the project and my ownership share (after the Kickstarter failed) to the other partners;
. They then tried to find someone to either buy or invest in the development of the project for a few years. I only got notice that they finally stopped paying the server bill a week or so ago.
Is Fullsail university a good place, or a diploma mill? Their commercial spots of a decade ago made it seem 1:1 to places like Everest University or ITT Tech.
I don't know. We thought it was the best graphics school in central Florida (where I live) and we had an in with a professor there. We paid some students there for most of the 3d modeling work we needed.
