Choose your partners with care

Last time I wrote about the partners you never sign anything with: your engine, your backend, your storefront. This time it's the kind you do.

Let me say straight away that our partnership with Darwin's Toys is fantastic. We love those people, and we love that working together has led to the games we've been able to release.

But I can't imagine how frustrating this process would be if we didn't have that great partnership.

Not everything is ours to decide

When you build a digital version of someone else's game, a lot of the big calls aren't yours.

The final word on the rules sits with another company. Most of the art comes from outside our two-person studio. And the release timeline is shaped, at least in part, by somebody else's calendar.

None of that is a complaint. It's the deal you make when you build on an established game, and it's a big part of why we could build this game at all. But it would be absolutely maddening if we didn't have such a close relationship on the other side.

The standstill

Here's the part nobody warns you about.

You sit down at the keyboard knowing that your next release, or even your next unit of work, depends on an answer, an email, or a set of files that another person at another company is working on. On their schedule, with their own priorities.

That's enough to make what is supposed to be a very fun endeavor feel a little too much like work.

With every map we've released, or started working on, there has been some point where we were effectively at a standstill, waiting on something from Darwin's Toys. Not because anyone dropped the ball. Empire Builder is just one of many irons Darwin's Toys has in the fire, and every one of them needs their attention. That's what happens when two small teams with different priorities are trying to move in step.

Some of this is just me. I hate dependency. I hate waiting on someone else to do something I could probably just do myself, but I don't want to duplicate the effort, so I wait. If I'm honest, I tend to take it as an affront that someone has let themselves become a blocker. That's not always a fair perspective. It's a pet peeve, and it really grinds my gears.

Waiting on a business partner is like waiting for the bus. You have no idea when it's coming, but you know it's already late. You really only have two options: wait, or give up and move on.

For a long time, I filled the gaps with tech debt. As I've mentioned before, our tooling never gets enough attention, so there's no shortage of work there. But it's not glamorous work, and doing it while you wait still feels a little like punishment.

These days I handle it better. I make sure I always have some side effort underway that I can shift my mind to, so a delay doesn't mean a full stop. That works most of the time. When we're under a deadline, real or imagined, I still get annoyed. But it's a lot better than where I started.

The partner down the hall

Not every dependency is on another company. The one that frustrates me most is the one I share a studio with.

Derek, like me, is a busy guy with a real life and a day job, and on top of that he owns or runs several other businesses. So sometimes he misses a commitment, and when my work depends on his, I'm the one who's stuck.

Organization and communication aren't his strongest suits. When he's running behind, I usually find out after I've already been waiting for hours. Being late, whether to arrive or to deliver, and leaving the person waiting on you in the dark? "Pet peeve" doesn't cover it. Maddening is more like it.

We do have a shared board to track our work. Derek updates it in fits and spurts. Coming up on a release, he's great at it, because at that point it solves a problem for him: it shows what's done, what needs testing, and what's left before we can ship. Then it goes quiet until I complain or the next release comes around. I'm better about keeping it current, but even I could do better.

Honestly, our partnership works in spite of all that, because of our history. Derek and I have been friends for more than 20 years and have worked together in some capacity for most of that time. We know what we're getting. I'm getting everything I just described. He's getting a cranky, short-tempered hermit who wants to move to the mountains and forget humanity exists.

It's not perfect. But it works.

What makes it work

With Darwin's Toys, it comes down to patience and good will. We genuinely like the people on the other side. So when they're running behind, it isn't hard to assume good intent and be patient, especially now that I'm not so single-threaded that a delay stops everything.

Some things are simple by design. Darwin's Toys is the arbiter of rule questions, so when one comes up, we ask and they tell us. There's rarely much more discussion than that.

It's a business now

Partnerships like this are the foundation of business. And if you ever want to release a game, at some point you're going to have to start thinking of it as a business.

That was a shift for us. We started this because we wanted to play a board game we never had time for. Somewhere along the way it turned into contracts, schedules, deliverables, and relationships we have a real responsibility to.

So choose your partners with care. And be sure to be as good a partner as you're hoping for from the other side.