Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I certainly didn't expect to grow from a solo-developer to a 6 people team [all while the industry decided to set itself on fire...] but... here we are! I'm super excited to finally start sharing what we've been working on in the past months, and why it also took so many resources to achieve it, from a new documentation, website, blog and more.

Hiring new people

In a few words: things went well but became too much to handle, so I needed to add more people to the team. At the time we were 4 (me, 2 artists and one level designer) and given that I contacted them because I already liked their work, the process was smooth and easy.

This time however... I was looking for a programmer and I didn't know anyone, so I opened up a job application.

January 2024: we got over 200 candidates and I got to take care of writing tests, reviewing them, having calls and then bureaucracy (Italy makes things slower x1000 too) . "Sula" joined the team in March and has been wonderful ever since. Phew.

However... we also had new opportunities and wanted to do more things, so here we are hiring again.

May 2024: we got over 800 candidates in 10 days. That's it. That's the story. I panicked, closed the application and started reviewing CVs, portfolios, calls etc. day after day, trying to reply to everyone and discussing the selected candidates' tests.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as the hiring process was on top of everything else we were already taking care of (which... remember... was too much to handle), plus training the new hire and... yeah - the industry - you got the point. Oh, and the Unity thing happened as well, which is now luckily reverted but it still didn't save us from a year of extra stress and uncertainty.

I'll tackle all of this is in a specific post (or multiple), as I'd love to make others' life easier in case they approach something similar. But it's good now, we're alive and finally finalized making things faster for ourselves too.

The bottleneck (it's a me!)

We noticed I was the bottleneck. Not because of delegating (I did!), but because every system we had was so much reliant on me and my machine. I never thought I'd have a team of 4+, let alone run a company and take care of its behind the scenes, so every single system I had wasn't easily scalable:

Editing the website? I wrote it on my computer (using Jekyll), and it was great as a technical and solo developer, but it was a pain to learn for everyone else (while also working on other tasks), slow for editing (having to write styling changes or even media paths manually) and anyways still reliant on me to format the files, upload or schedule them.

This also meant our tools documentation was locked behind this process, as any change we wanted to release required manual editing, by me, on Jekyll. Good luck if I was away for events (I attended almost one per month this year), or overwhelmed by other tasks, or if we wanted to make consecutive tweaks to a few words after user feedbacks.

Same thing for writing posts, we just couldn't do anything without me being a little bit involved.

I trust the team and they're here for a reason, so... we've worked hard to make sure we could fix all of the above and then some!

What's new

After months of hard work, on top of all the other tasks and projects, we're finally able to press the release button!

Documentation

We've improved the documentation of our tool(s)! It's cleaner, allows us to edit in real time and collaborate together (with no bottlenecks!), and since we were already there... we've also reworked and improved many pages thanks to user feedback, hoping that it's even simpler and easier to understand than before!

It also has a search bar, which was missing on the previous version but we believe it can become super helpful as it allows you to search for any text, not only titles.

Making tools in our case also means providing APIs so that everyone can read which scripts have which methods more easily, and we took the opportunity to move it on a new subdomain (from "febucci.com/[tool]/api/..." to "api.febucci.com/tool/" etc.). We still need to manually upload it once we release new versions, but we can't wait to automate this process as well.

Website

We have new landing pages! And animations! And it's smooth! 🥹

This applies to everything we released, including our Text Animator for Unity.

Again, now it's easier to set up, collaborate together and tweak different pages faster. (And it's also prettier in my opinion... but I'm biased.)

We improved many pages, from UX to content and discoverability.

For example, we also tried to fix a navigation issue we had on the previous version of the site, as it was hard to separate the many things we do (games, tools, posts) but still connect them together under one website (since it's still us, after all).

The previous, hard-to-navigate version:

The current version, with how we solved it (tabs!!):

Blog

Well... you're reading it now! We ported all the posts we shared on the previous website, redirected their urls, changed the styling and much more.

It still requires manual work for its styling (it's written in tailwind and Ghost), but now that we have our theme we should be good for a while.

The pagination is better, readability should be as well, but most importantly... we can collaborate together and share our own posts without bottlenecks! This means we can improve it faster and build on it together.

We have many plans for this, so we're enthusiast that it's finally out.

Mission, Team and Logo

We took the opportunity to write out what we love to do, why we're doing so and how to achieve it, so that new people can onboard easily and we also never forget during busy times.

It's all good when everything in your head and you're by yourself (or a very small team)... but it becomes way harder to steer in the same direction when you have new people joining at different times and losing a few pieces of the puzzle. Especially when things get hectic.

All lessons I loved learning, and I can't wait to share too.

We even got a new logo working together with the wonderful Cristiano Spada, which you've seen multiple times already!

...and more!

We went to many events (e.g. Develop Reboot Blue, Nordic Games and Gamescom), heard a lot of stories (some good, some from.... the industry on fire), but we were so happy to see so much positive feedbacks from people using our stuff, thanking us for our tools and even giving us free hugs for the entirety of Gamescom.

We even reworked our internal tickets system (for support requests), collaboration tools and more.

That's why we have so many things to share... Aaaaaaaah!! No more pauses that are this long, I felt so bad but we couldn't do differently :c

Wrapping up

We're finally set up and able to start sharing what we've been working on in the past months and learned.. but it's not all! We have prototyped new things (where some require a lot of time still, while others are much closer) and we can't wait to put them in the wild as well. This whole "website+docs+blog etc." rework needed to release all together (the last, major bossfight bottleneck for us), but we're finally free now and ready to be active again.

We want to help developers, make great games, and share everything in between.

Hear you soon and thanks for all the support over the years!