Welcome to my blog!

This first post on canceling a project is a bit of an oddball as the subject can be quite gloomy and depressing. Nonetheless, I felt I had something of value to share, and the timing was appropriate. Just for the fun of it, I’ll also pepper it with quotes from Warren Buffett, investor extraordinaire and a no-frill common sense guy if there was ever one.

I hope that a reader can gain something from this experience. I end the post with takeaways which I believe apply to many other areas of life, including personal relationships. In many ways, canceling a project in which you have invested plenty of sweat, money, and tears can be very similar to going through a breakup. It’s no wonder it’s such a hard decision.

After we launched Slice Fractions in early 2014, we spent a year and a half trying to sustain sales and bring Slice Fractions to a broader audience in schools. While the initial release was a critical success, with Apple worldwide featuring and all, we were less successful in adapting it to new markets.

So we decided to make significant changes in our approach, and we started a second learning game franchise codenamed Secret Powers: Animals. The initial idea was to let players craft their creatures by merging features of real animals such as the speed of a cheetah, the strength of a gorilla, etc. Through it, you’d eventually learn the tradeoffs needed to create a well-balanced ecosystem. We even had the ambition to represent inspiring scenarios such as the one described in the excellent video How Wolves Change Rivers.

With an early mockup video and a presentation deck, we managed to raise money from the Canada Media Funds to fund a prototype and do marketing research. We were excited.

Fast forward a year later, we had lost one founder and one employee. By then we felt like the road ahead was way, way longer than initially planned. We didn’t even know if the game would require 500,000$ or 5 million dollars to complete.

Another six months later, around March 2017, we were burnt out. By that point, Ululab was down to François and me. We had spent more than a whole year on doing nothing but trying to flesh out that elusive engaging, award-winning gameplay.

And we had very little to show for it.

Our bruised egos had to admit that we didn’t have what it take to achieve that project. Not anymore. The multiple dead ends left us like empty shells creatively. I was a chihuahua stupidly trying to chew on a blue whale’s bones, on a beach while tidal water was rising. I felt like I was drowning in failures.

To deal with the guilt, I came to the office every day, but with the explicit goal of doing anything but working on the SPA project.

After a couple of weeks of that medicine, with a clear head, we decided to return the remaining funds to of our investor and put that project on hold indefinitely.

So what went wrong?

The problem wasn’t with people not liking the idea. The problem was the game sucked, and our vision for it had too many holes we couldn’t figure how to fill. If you’re trying to make money out of creating video games, you have to aim higher than 60% reviews, and you have to believe in it.

Unlike with Slice Fractions, we sold the idea before validating it. After working on a few prototypes, we realized that there was a lot more innovation to chew on than we expected initially.

Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

• Warren Buffet

And here comes our first mistake. Usually, when you hit a wall like this in early prototyping, it’s okay just to turn around and go somewhere else. But since we had already raised funding for that game, we felt the pressure to stick to the same concept. That was a bad idea.

I don’t look to jump over seven-foot bars: I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.

• Warren Buffet

After spending even more time and money, we then had the additional pressure of vested interest; admitting failure would mean discarding more than a year of work!

That’s eerily similar to what happens with plenty of unhappy couples.

So we kept at it. We tried plenty of ideas on the same pitch. We went from a Sim City-like to a Civilization-like game, to a full-on simulator, then to a puzzle game.

What did we learn?

So the Big Takeaways we found are:

• Don’t commit too much until you are ready to go long
• Don’t look back at what you have invested. Look ahead and see if the plan still makes sense. Losing two million dollars isn’t better than losing one. Losing twice the time is even worse as you’ll never get that one back.

The most important thing to do if you find yourself in a hole is to stop digging.

• Warren Buffet

• Try to take some time off to recharge your batteries. When your nose is in it, it’s not always easy to see clearly, and it’s easier to start piling strategic mistakes.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

• Warren Buffet

• Here is something we did well though: when the gameplay proved to be the critical path, we all rallied to fix it. We didn’t stay in our silos, making marketing promises we couldn’t keep and write code we couldn’t ship. This reduced cost to the bare minimum to give us time and money to fix the problem. It also prevented further vested interest in other dimensions of the product. We know teams who shipped expensive commercial failures and knew about it before shipping, just because of the internal and external pressure to deliver something.
• Stay humble and don’t take it personal. You’ll never be able to try out all options. Maybe one more week would have unlocked a double rainbow, and you would have won the lottery. But you’ll never, ever know. That’s hard.
• If you can’t stay cool about it, ask external people you trust to pitch in and cut through your bullshit (and thank them for their honesty!).

As long as you do your best with the constraints you had, there is nothing else you can do. Don’t kill yourself over it, live to fight another battle. Life is a marathon.

Next post, I’ll talk about what we did to gain back our sanity after shelving Secret Powers: Animals!