Changes behind the scenes

As promised in my recent progress report blog, here is my follow-up about what has changed behind the scenes at iGP for 2015.

The Startup Curve

When iGP Manager started, like any young game studio, we were full of hope and optimism. After an initially great launch we were very positive and excited about the future. There were just two of us that founded iGP and working on it at the time. To this day that hasn't really changed much, but to skim over everything in between is to greatly understate the struggle endured to be here today.

The reality for us, like a lot of startup companies, is that it was very difficult to maintain momentum and even to keep the company afloat. I've been working on iGP Manager (full-time) since the start, and still have to wait and see if/when I get a salary. The company has been good at sustaining itself but not the people behind it.

It took everything out of me and the other founder, who eventually left, unable to continue the long hours and low pay with iGP. That departure led to some very difficult periods through late 2012 up to 2014 where I was largely the only active developer, running the company, managing accounts, paying bills, handling the helpdesk, forums, bugfixes, managing and repairing data, rescheduling races, trying to build new updates at the same time. I've often questioned my own sanity for sticking around and felt like an overworked one-man-band (the reason for the image on the article).

We also had substandard administrative tools in the past which made simple tasks extremely laborious. There were days where I'd work until 2am, go to bed, and get woken at 3am by alerts to do repairs, work until 5 or 6 am, only to start again as soon as I woke up again. I remember one week working 20 hours a day for 5 days straight, operating on 3 hours sleep each day and barely leaving to eat. It was no way to live. I considered shutting it down several times but felt obliged to keep providing a service to our customers. I have always maintained that this is the best game of its kind on the market, and has the potential to be better still.

During those difficult times I found a graph which charted the life of a successful startup. It seemed too familiar to be coincidence. I figured that we were probably in the "Trough of Sorrow" or "Crash of Ineptitude" at the time, which at least gave me hope that the turn around was ahead!

Things are on the way up now, but before I go in to that, I must mention Andrew Hurn and Steve Myers. They both provided a great deal of support and mentoring to me personally throughout the recovery period for iGP. Having prior business experience (unlike me), they were very helpful in pointing out a way forward and I want to say a big thank you to both of you. Aaron on the helpdesk also needs a mention for the great support he has provided.

Postponed updates

If you have been around long enough to remember the original blog posts about version 2 and the new design system etc. then you would have expected it to be released by now. We were held back for a long time by unforeseen scalability issues with the service, which were also behind how hard we had to work to keep things running smoothly.

But as early as 2013 there were signs that better times lay ahead. That is when we brought on Chris Foster, our new simulator and viewer developer. Chris was fresh out of University at the time and needed some time to get his head around the system. I am happy to say he is now up to speed and producing some much needed updates to the simulator.

Things moved very slowly for a while, with gradual improvements being made whenever we got a chance between all the noise. That is now starting to change. We expect the postponed updates to arrive early in 2015.

Norway

Recently I received full ownership of the parent company iGP Games and moved to Norway. Although, I moved to be with my girlfriend, leaving London reduced the amount of "noise" and distractions in general. Receiving full ownership also changes much behind the scenes, allowing me more flexibility to steer the game where it needs to go. All of this created time and opportunity to work with Chris to plot a course for the future of iGP, to get things back on track.

Recent developments may not add features to the front-end, but they make all the difference to our ability to add them going forward. We have far more detailed administrative tools and automated handling of glitches, which will massively reduce the amount of manpower needed to maintain everything. Also in the pipeline are improvements to service latency and uptime, to more than handle the strain of demand we get. We've also recently launched improvements which have stopped "connection error" problems. In other words, we're finally able to address the underlying scalability issues with the service. This will free us up to focus on gameplay development in 2015.

This is why I said in my other blog that things are different now. A lot has changed and the future looks very bright for iGP, and for us being able to live normal, sane lives as the developers behind it! We're looking forward to bringing you some gameplay updates as soon as we can.

I never thought I would say this, but one thing I miss about London is the weather. It's already sub-zero here (-5.5 celsius where I was yesterday). I'm envious that back home you are getting 15-20 degrees. That would feel tropical to me right now!