Seeds of Earth

The context

Seeds of Earth was Big Byte Studios’ most ambitious project, a space-set action RPG with eight contributors across roughly three years. I led production on it. It is also the project my co-founder and I chose to cancel together, and that decision is exactly why it’s on this site.

What I owned

• Production leadership. Led production end to end, from planning through to the final call.
• Scope, schedule & budget. Owned the plan against the time and funding we actually had, and tracked it honestly as the gap between ambition and runway widened.
• Team coordination. Kept eight contributors across disciplines aligned and moving through roughly three years of development.
• The stop/go call. Reached the decision to cancel together with my co-founder when scope outran resources, and owned my share of the root cause.

The hardest call a producer makes

When the scope outran the time and funding we actually had, my co-founder and I made the call to stop together. Getting truly aligned on that decision is a big part of why we’re still friends. And the root cause was ours to share: he rebuilt systems more times than we could afford, and I wasn’t yet experienced enough as a developer to take enough off his plate. In the end, we weren’t productive enough, in planning or in skill, for the time and money we had.

Cancelling a project you’ve poured three years into is hard. Knowing when to stop, and being willing to reflect on why, is how you avoid repeating the same mistakes, and it’s the same judgment that keeps healthy projects improving. Showing a cancelled project here is deliberate. It’s evidence of making hard decisions and being honest, not just with myself, but with the world.