After roughly 15 years of traditional software engineering in database architecture, data science, and algorithmics, Ryan Nicoletti set off into a personal frontier of independent development.  The journey since late 2018 has been bumpy and fraught with perils, like a startup with friends that never managed to emerge from a promising tech feasibility study or a software development partnership months in the making that fell through in final legal negotiations. 

 

One constant endeavor since that troubled beginning has been learning the art of video game development, scratching at Ryan's itch to try game design that had lain quiescent alongside both video and board game hobbies for nearly 25 years.  Trouble did find its way to this work as well, in the form of notable volatility in software tools that delayed an inaugural game release for months at a time.

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Persistence pays off, though: Ryan successfully completely a data architecture consultancy during the Spring of 2020 and Stitchcraft, his first commercial game release, is set to debut in Summer 2020.  He has learned a lot in the meantime, including a new appreciation for (but precious-little affinity for) the necessity and difficulty of soft-skills like sales, marketing, and business negotiation. 

 

He's also had one other singularly-important realization: the biggest benefit of autonomous work isn't getting to make all the decisions yourself - it's the luxury of choosing the teammates who will help advise, guide, and collaborate with you on all the other decisions you will make.

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