Taking the Plunge
There’s a reason they call it that. When we first started out there was a definite feeling of being submerged, buried under a hundred different conflicting decisions, lungs filling with the thousand different reasons not to do what we’d just done, swimming shorts lost in the undercurrent of self doubt… it’s here where the metaphor starts to fall apart… The point is that it’s not an easy decision to make, and at times it can be incredibly intimidating, giving up a regular income to focus on something you’ve spoken about doing for years. Is it worth it? All that stress and worry?
I took a lot of comfort from motivational wallpapers. I listened to upbeat tracks to get me pumped I had long involved conversations with my cat, trying to divine meaning from the mouthful of grass he’d just thrown up on my carpet. Ultimately it came down to some simple truths: The pro’s really did outweigh the cons and the regret we’d feel for not having at least tried would far outstrip the regret we’d feel from having tried and failed.
So we jumped.
We made productions plans, we made websites, we signed up for courses and talks and trade shows, we spoke to everyone we could think of, we made business cards, we made prototypes, we drank litres of coffee… to go back to the plunge metaphor I guess this was us… trying to construct some kind of crude scuba suit before we hit the water, or maybe we were just trying to angle our bodies so we didn’t belly-flop horrifically when we landed…
…and when we did hit the water, and once we’d scrambled our way back to the surface and we started to actually work on the game properly, we remembered something… we quite like swimming, hell we love swimming, we might be in the middle of a huge ocean, there might be sharks circling us and sure we’d lost our swimming shorts in the first paragraph, but right now the water’s cool, the sun’s shining and we’re loving it!