| Great comment! Thank you! :) We love each day we spend working on this, so yes we definitely see ourselves working on it in 5 - 10 years. ^^ You're right about about the fact it may be hard to sell spiritual derivative at the beginning. We realized many Minecraft players only play for a few weeks when there's a major update (~once a year). Mainly because of the lack of renewed content and the lack of very diverse experiences. This is where Roblox excels. We want Particubes to become an alternative for them, when they're done playing Minecraft and still want to play in a familiar environment where they can interact with everything. We're still big Minecraft fans ourselves (as players and server admins). Particubes is a way to fix some of our own frustrations with it, but will end up being a very different product. Also, sorry to read about the licensing agreement issues with Valve. :(
We thought about building a good scripting environment for Minecraft instead of building our own engine, but depending on it felt risky, and since we're in for the long run... |
No one really articulates that level of project planning in this space, so let me be the person to mention it.
You could be working on updating the user interface while you're asking yourself if you need to really be focusing on this, or finding a new job so that you can afford that engagement ring, or asking yourself what features or bug fixes you need to prioritize in the middle of having your car fixed.
You might end up postponing voice chat until the next major release because you can't get a week of time to yourself because Valentine's Day is coming up and you haven't planned how dinner and a movie is going to work with COVID-19 changing what is possible.
You know, stuff like that. Because you're definitely going to have full-time affairs while working on this stuff.
And don't just focus on the product. So many great developers who have the skill to work on these projects focus 100% of their time on the actual product, which is of course, critical. If you don't have something good, no one will play it.
Keep in mind that at some point in time, you'll need a strategy to move from 100% development and documentation to a near minimum 60/40 of product development and marketing.
Far in advance, figure out what your penetration strategy is. For example, what forums you need to establish a presence on, what fledgling YouTubers you need to create relationships with, how you incentivize kids to share the game with their friends and what devices they're using. The latter most being perhaps the most difficult space to understand, since I constantly hear no one uses a desktop or laptop anymore.
You need to have spreadsheets of this stuff and measure how you're making progress in creating a headspace for your product in people's minds based on their routines of where they go to hang out and what content they consume.
Best of luck! You have a great piece of software here, just keep it up. If you want to play it, there's bound to be others who want to, too.