Today, I made myself a Twitter account. Finally, I'd add. It's more than half a year ago that Michiel and I opened a Twitter account for Wee Free Studio and it took quite a while for me to actually start using that account. Before that, Michiel sent out our tweets.

So what's the big deal about that? Well, I have a sort of reverse shyness. I'm almost never shy when I'm talking face to face to people, I'm quite shy when talking on the phone (even to people I know well) and I'm very shy when it comes to written communication*. Thus using Twitter causes me a great deal of discomfort (as does writing emails to people I don't know very well, replying to thing in a public forum or a comments section, etc.). I have no idea why.

But the thing is that we do have to go out there if we want to be noticed. This is true for any online business, but even more so for indie game developers. People who are interested in indie games, especially those looking for the next new thing, are often also very much interested in the people behind those games. So we have to let the interwebs know who we are. And I can't leave that just to Michiel.

That's one good reason for me to start a twitter account. The other one is much more practical. The tweets I've sent through @weefreestudio were often of the form "I wrote a blog post!" plus a link. But this both feels weird and is confusing, since Wee Free Studio is two people and not just one. So I looked around and found that @Vlambeer does this in an elegant and logical way. As far as I've seen, they never use "I" or "me" in their tweets, but instead always refer to their personal twitter accounts.

Two good reasons for a personal twitter account, but still that reverse shyness to overcome. Luckily, even the very few posts I made through @weefreestudio were enough to convince me that I'd actually use the account after I created it. (What also helps is writing these blog posts, which is also getting easier with time... Could it be that practice does actually make perfect?) So I went and created my own Twitter account: @Fuddleclutch.

Fuddleclutch, by the way, was my Gnomish warlock engineer in WoW, back when I still played. Although I later deleted him to roll a Death Knight. Technically this was due to the character limit per server, but I thought it was also a fitting way to create a Death Knight. I always liked the name, and it stuck as my go-to name when my usual online aliases are unavailable (which was the case for Twitter).

Anyway, I guess I'll send out a tweet now about how I wrote a blog post about tweeting :).

-Willem-

*As far as I can tell, most people are shy the other way around; more reluctant to speak to people in real life than to write stuff online. That's why I dub this reverse shyness. But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way. If so, be sure to let me know via @Fuddleclutch ;).

For me (Willem), Powargrid development has been a bit slower than usual of late. The agency where I work during the daytime is reorganizing, which leeches energy (even though no one will be fired), and the kids have been waking up in the middle of the night a lot. But, luckily, things are calming down (both at work and at home) and I'm picking up speed again. At the moment (well not at the moment, but up till just now and I'll continue after typing up this post), I'm working on a new mission for the campaign. It's now at the stage where things are starting to come together, which is a terrific place to be, because it feels like you're crossing the fuzzy boundary between a concept and an actual playable mission.

I took the afternoon off from work (the telephone repairman should be here shortly; brilliant excuse for an extra afternoon of hacking), and I'm sitting here wishing that all my days were like this :). And I hope that somewhere in the future, things will work out that way. We're bootstrapping Wee Free Studio next to our dayjobs for now. But once we manage to sell some games, we can start to think of working less in our dayjobs and more on games. Heck, I'm already buying three weeks of extra leave from my employer this year, so I have more time to focus on Powargrid development. Our aim for 2014 is to develop Powargrid far enough that we feel we can enter beta, to put it up for beta-sale on our website and to sell at least one copy to someone we don't know personally. Looking at the positive reviews we're receiving (such as from Alpha Beta Gamer), and the state of development Powargrid is in now, I think there's a good chance we'll hit that target at the least :).

And once that happens, who knows? I'm not a very big spender (with the small disclaimer that a mortgage and two days of daycare per week for two small children tend to eat up quite some money), so sales won't have to be enormous for me to warrant taking an extra day off work each week to spend on creating games. [As a quick aside: the tips from Mr Money Mustache help in the saving money department. He rightly states that it's a lot easier and more effective to cut your living expenses than to improve your income.]

I daresay Michiel is also willing to trade dayjob-time for game-develop-time, once we're selling enough games. Then, if we manage to create more cool games and luck is on our side, we could end up in a virtuous cycle of having to work less in our dayjobs and being able to spend more time on Wee Free Studio. Yes, that'd be cool. That'd be really cool. And even if that does not come to pass, we'll still have created a game we really like, still have learned loads while doing this and still have built up an appetite for more :).

But now it's time to stop rambling and get back to that mission, since it won't finish itself ;).

-Willem-