It was pretty awesome, it even lasted a little while in the Popular New Release list, and also one of the feature panels for a while (probably a few hours only).
But hey I can't complain - it was my first crappy game and it got shown on Steam for a little bit :)
Release day was probably the most hectic - tons of key requests came through from the press. I had to respond to a lot of forum activity. These are the times I wish I had a community manager - but unfortunately no one from the existing team had stepped forward, so I ended up having to do it. I guess I knew the game/product the best anyway.
It was a pretty exhausting time for the next 2-3 days, but finally traffic peaked and started to die away.
Fortunately for me I had planned out the entire lead up to release day really well: every single task was in a Gantt chart and we had ticked everyone of them off like clockwork. If nothing else I was pretty proud of the planning and execution. I can take that plan away with me when I do this again next time.
I think truthfully this project was only ever a test. We got what we wanted out of it: namely the education. I learned so much via a trial by fire over the past couple of years. I had been flailing around a lot, but now I feel like I could do this again - faster, better and more confidently.
I'm not the smartest, most technical, or most creative person around, but I am glad my work experience forced me to learn rapidly.
I will need to sit down at some point and write up a full post mortem. This will be critical as I will want to encapsulate all of our mistakes so that we don't make them again.
I had written up a preliminary one in TIG Source:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=55375.0
So there we were - we had finished a game project all on our own. Who would have thought? :)
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