Around late April of this year, Will and I took a moment to evaluate. A whole stinking year had passed since we set out to be game developers, and all we had to show for it was a stream of prototypes—crumbs of games, all unfinished. This isn’t unusual, but it is disheartening. Game development is difficult at the best of times, but feels doubly so as the months stretch on and the finish line inches further back beside them. We’d had our doubts along the way, but that last week of April magnified them, made them real, and made us think: are we cut out for this thing after all? Are we just wasting our time?

The bad news is that we can’t really answer those questions. (Not yet, at least.) The good news is that we’ve officially decided not to care.

Our very first game released in early September. That’s nearly a year and a half from when we started, but there’s a catch: from idea to release, this first release only took a few months to create. Shortly after our dark night of the soul, Will and I cleaned house. We ditched the mountain of prototypes. We stepped back, took a deep breath, and finally asked ourselves the question that everyone-tells-you-to-ask-but-you-can’t-really-ask-until-you’ve-already-screwed-up: what was the simplest game we could make that we could very quickly figure out if it was fun? We took all that we’d learned, hit the reset button, and got to work.

Tiny Boxes was born.

We have lessons aplenty from this first year of development. We’ll save those for future posts. For now, though, and without any further ado, we’d like to announce Made with Mustard’s next big thing.

We’re going to release 12 games in 12 months, starting with our first release on November 1st, 2017.

This will be a challenge. In light of all that you’ve just read, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s an impossible one. We have a different take: it’s a necessity. If we want to do this—make games, make money—we don’t have time to obsess over the idea. We don’t have time to write and rewrite and design and redesign and endlessly tweak in the pursuit of perfection.

We have time to take a simple idea, turn it into a simple game, and then move on to the next. Here, now, many months from when we first began, educated by the process and so much more realistic about the requirements, we feel finally capable of doing this. More importantly, we feel excited to get started.

Made with Mustard has one mission: to make high-quality games for everyone, even non-gamers.

It starts now. Here we go!

With love,

Matt

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