The comics were the plan

Madcap Comics Battleground started as a way to sell comics. I have not thought about the comics in about three weeks.

The idea was straightforward and, I thought, quite good. A shop selling comics needs people who like superheroes to turn up. Build a small superhero battle game, put it next to the shop, and the people playing it are exactly the people who buy from it. Marketing that doesn't feel like marketing.

That's still, technically, the plan. It's on the site. It would survive a conversation with anyone who asked what I was doing.

Then there's where the evenings have actually gone. Last week I spent most of one on the fact that battles currently resolve in the browser, which is fine for two people playing in good faith and useless the moment there's a league table anyone cares about. The week before that, on cosmetics that deliberately confer no advantage, so there's something to chase at the top of the ladder that never touches game balance.

I'm pleased with both of those. Neither sells a comic. There is no ladder, and nobody is at the top of it.

What happened is duller than a decision. Nothing was chosen. I set out to build a marketing channel, found the underlying problem more interesting than the thing it was meant to promote, and followed the interesting part. It took weeks to notice, and I only noticed because someone asked how the store was going and I answered about turn resolution.

The part I keep turning over is that I'd never have built this on purpose. If I'd sat down and decided to make a superhero team battler in my evenings, with a full-time job and four other projects running, I'd have talked myself out of it inside a day. Too big, no users, no reason. The shop is what made it allowable. It gave the game a job, the job was enough to get it started, and once it was started the job stopped mattering.

That's a strange thing to be grateful for. Most of what I don't build, I don't build because I can't justify it to myself. Not to anyone else. There's nobody to pitch. The gatekeeping is entirely internal and it's surprisingly strict, and the only reliable way past it seems to be having something else that needs doing which the fun thing can be attached to.

So the stated purpose did real work. Just not the work it claimed.

I don't think this needs correcting. The shop still runs, the listings are still up, comics sell at the rate they sold at before. The store asks almost nothing of me week to week, which is part of why it was so easy to drift away from. What I've lost is a customer acquisition strategy I wasn't attached to and that probably wasn't going to work. What I've got is the only project of mine I open in the evening because I want to rather than because it's Tuesday.

That's the more useful signal. On a side project the constraint isn't time and it isn't skill. It's whether you're still there in month four. A plan can't tell you that. What you reach for at ten at night can.

The plan is a hypothesis. Where the effort goes is the data. I'm not sure I'd override the data even if I could.

Maybe the game does eventually sell comics. If it works, the people playing it are still exactly the people who'd buy from the shop, and the original logic holds even though I've stopped acting on it. That would be a good accident.

It isn't why I'll be working on it tonight.