Lessons Learned on Running A Company For Three Years
It’s our 3rd birthday! Three years ago, Foulplay Games officially became a business focused on creating geeky murder mystery party games that anyone could enjoy! We never knew what to expect, but we are so excited to celebrate and to have the opportunity once again to thank all of our Foulplayers for their support!
Like any birthday, we find ourselves thinking about all the amazing moments we’ve had, the lessons learned, and what we hope the future brings. We are so grateful to have yet another chance to share our reflections as well as look ahead to the wonders and joys that await us in the future!
What are we waiting for? Let’s jump right in! (And check out our reflection of our first year and our second year of Foulplay!)
Celebrating Foulplay’s Third Birthday!
Maddy:
What would you tell yourself 3 years ago that you wish you would have known?
I wish I would have known that it is better to finish something and put it out for others to enjoy and give feedback to rather than create obstacles and hard-to-reach standards that slow down the process and enjoyment. Our first game took months and months to finish and publish, and while we take a lot of pride in the detail and depth of all of our worlds, it’s never going to be perfect. Instead of delaying, we could have always published, gotten feedback, and tailored and tweaked from there. These expectations can drain away a little of the fun and energy, and I feel lucky that we did get things off the ground! Now we are more confident in our stories and realize sharing them serves our audience better than keeping them to ourselves.
We hosted our flagship game, WANDERSTAR, for the first time over two years ago at Nerdfaire!
What is exciting in this moment for Foulplay?
I am excited to help our hosts transition back to in-person games! Our love of murder mystery games started at Western Washington University and we loved decorating, planning themed food, admiring the creative costumes, and the energy of a great party or game night. When we launched, we couldn’t have imagined how to move all of that online. Luckily through platforms like Zoom and Gather, we were able to bring a lot of joy and fun to Foulplayers online. However, in-person games give us so many options, and I’m excited to help our Hosts with murder mystery photo booth props, ability cards, and themed food and drink guides for all of our parties! Plus, I can’t wait to see all the photos!
What are you excited about for the upcoming year?
One of the things I’m excited about is the potential to expand on Twitch! We have had a few Foulplayers like @Voraktee and @PirateReject host our murder mystery games on Twitch and it is such a unique and fun way for people to follow along and interact with their favorite streamer as they scheme and sleuth. We are working on releasing a Twitch toolkit for streamers to host their favorite Foulplay murder mystery game on their channel and looking forward to themed streams in the nearby future!
Thanks to PirateReject and Voraktee for streaming our game on Twitch for the first time in January!
Kristen:
What would you tell yourself 3 years ago that you wish you would have known?
Not to overthink things when first starting a business. Overthinking is the enemy of progress. It can be really easy to get into an overplanning state of mind, but if you get too far down the rabbit hole, it becomes a prime example of a “putting the cart before the horse” scenario, which means you are having to rethink things all over again anyway. I would go back and tell myself that spending the extra time overthinking all these steps isn’t worth it, that evaluating every decision with such scrutiny will not win the day; it is more important to just make forward progress and to learn and adapt from here. Looking back, the overthinking was just wasted time and energy from writing games or other things that could have served us (and myself) better. I will admit that this is still a skill and lesson I am working on learning, but even being aware of it in large part has helped our business move forward in so many ways, and having that sage wisdom early would have been helpful.
What is exciting in this moment for Foulplay?
Two words: Game writing! Right now we are actively working on new worlds, characters, themes, and games! It feels like we’ve been in the middle of our rebrand and getting all of that situated forever, so now we are taking the opportunity to actually move forward with the fun stuff, and I think our fans and future foulplayers will really enjoy what we’re cooking up!
What are you excited about for the upcoming year?
I’m going to cheat a bit here and pick two: one of which is now that we’ve settled into our branding and website that we did last year, things feel like they are falling into place and we can focus on pushing and expanding a bit more. We have a more solid foundation to build from and all the grunt work we did in relaunching our brand is finished, so now we can take advantage of this time to push forward.
And the second is conventions! We will be at Rose City Comic Con and PNW True Crime Fest this fall, and we are so excited to finally be back in person and interacting with people!
