
Ask HN: Most amount of time you spent on a project with nothing to show for it? - act9
Edit:  The question was meant for <i>personal unpaid</i> time, not a company funded project that was scrapped.
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binarysolo
Worked with a friend and his family's privately owned SMB to monetize an
additional revenue stream. Spent 6 months part time and used a bunch of social
currency to get a Fortune-100 company on board as a paying customer for MVP.

Asked to signed a contract as a consultant so they could "properly compensate
me" \-- trusted and signed and got kicked out the next day + had a gag order
in the agreement so I couldn't talk publically about it.

Lost a friend and learned a big life lesson there. The project floundered
after that; it was my heart's desire to make it work even if I wasn't there,
but they just shuttered it without letting me know. I emailed them to give me
some peace and closure by at least letting me know why they did what they did
but never got a response. I still see this "friend" due to a common-ish social
circle.

Bad things happen some times -- I haven't lost the ability to trust and have
faith in people; my opinion of lawyers and contracts that protect me have
increased though.

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tomasz207
At university, I spent almost a thousand dollars on an espresso machine and a
few hundred dollars on cups. I was going to open up a to-the-classroom coffee
delivery service. I just never pulled the trigger. I've had really good
espresso every morning though, and the cups are reusable.

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krapp
I've had some web app projects i've been playing with for a couple of years
now - i've completely rewritten some from scratch several times over (and I
have yet to actually finish the custom framework I was going to make for my
personal website which has been useless since about 2011.) And if you count
Game Maker projects that i've started, stopped, and restarted again, and given
up on again... maybe five or six years?

Although with my tendency to ignore projects entirely for weeks or months at a
time, it's not as bad as it seems but still there's a long line of failed
projects behind me. Really, what do I have to show for anything? Not much.

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_cheese_
A person I know quite well explained to me how his company hired a team of six
or so developers to work on a project full-time. They worked on the project
for about about two years before feeling ready to showcase it to clients. Once
they showcased it to clients they realized their solution was far too generic
for its intended application and it had to be scrapped. Huge amounts of time
and money lost due to bad project management and inability to meet market
needs. The solution ended up so generic that it could not really fit the
specific role it was needed for. Its intended market requires a high amount of
attention to specificity and detail.

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richardjdare
My first game for an early mobile platform (2003) took me six months and sold
600 copies. My latest iPhone release took a couple of years of part time work,
and doesn't look like it will even approach that. It won't even cover the cost
of repairs I made to my macbook during development.

I am proud of my games, I only ever wanted to be a game designer but right now
I'm feeling wary of expending so much effort again for so little reward or
even recognition.

~~~
alphagenerator
Mind posting the URL to your iOS game? I would like to try it out.

~~~
richardjdare
[http://antigengame.com](http://antigengame.com)

~~~
alphagenerator
Well, I bought the game and I gave it a shot. I like indie-productions like
this.

The game is fun but I encountered a little snag where, somehow, it'd keep
asking me if I wanted to resume the game constantly. I must be doing something
non-standard with my thumbs and this takes away from the experience.

Granted, I play this on an iPad at 1x-mode, so the form factor difference
might be the reason for the constant pausing.

~~~
richardjdare
Hmm, Not sure what the problem would be. Are you accidentally touching the top
right corner of the screen? Thats where the pause button is, there's a little
video player pause icon up there. I made that whole corner into a pause button
so it's easy to hit when your playing on the iPhone

~~~
alphagenerator
Nope. Fingers are always on the fingerprint icons. Just keeps flipping into
the resume screen.

~~~
richardjdare
I will see what I can find out. It doesn't happen on iphone or ipod touch.
Thanks for the bug report!

~~~
alphagenerator
Some more information:

When I put the system at 2x and played the game, I made it as far as level 8
without a glitch. Then, all of a sudden, it kept going into a mode where it
kept asking me to resume again. I play the game on landscape mode on an iPad
Air, if it helps you any.

The game is fun.

My constructive criticism is more business related than game related. For
$1.99, there are other apps that give you a lot of strong competition. An ad
model or some other addictive mechanic that employs IAP once people have it in
their hands might work better for you. Also, more people looking at it will
get you more feedback, and that'll guide your future development as a
developer.

Regardless, I've added your blog to my list of blogs to read. I'd like to see
you succeed in your efforts, whatever it is you try (if you continue on this
path.)

Thanks for sharing the link.

~~~
richardjdare
Thanks mate, To be honest the game was designed primarily for iphone and ipod
touch. I've tested it on 3 generations of iphones and ipods.

When I set the deployment target to "iphone" rather than "universal" I assumed
the app store would exclude those devices. I will have to get my hands on the
various ipad models for more testing.

I've always been a bit wary of the IAP model used by so many mobile games. I
guess I am more of an oldschool designer, better suited to making PC games.
Oh, and thanks for checking out my blog. I've got a lot more writing in the
pipeline.

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eropple
Years. I've made a lot of games not up to the level of quality I want to be
associated with. They're in a graveyard on my NAS.

I don't buy into the "it doesn't have to be good, it has to be done"; for me
it has to be good _and_ done to feel okay having my name on it. But I'm
getting much better at this, and am working on a project I feel good about.

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pmurphyirl
A whole summer mid-college in my late teens (three months of prime time it
turned out!) coding a cloud e-learning platform for the industrial training
vertical (what a Cornerstone does today basically) for a partner who then
didn't sell any product, disappeared and I had to go and sue - cost me both
time and legal fees!

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pistoriusp
I spent 11 months writing an app,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS6Z81dMzhc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS6Z81dMzhc),
and sold less and sold less than 100 copies. It was probably too much to take
on as my second app... I did learn a lot though.

~~~
coryl
Make it free now and see where it goes?

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_random_
Months.

