What was Polus.gg?

Polus.gg was a small indie game studio I founded. It published a Steam game designed to make playing Among Us with mods easy. It gained a massive following with the discord associated with the project gaining tens of thousands of active members.

Overview

• Founded and lead the company
• Lead a team in making extensions and mods for both the server and client
• Designed and built a custom Node.js UDP server designed to replicate the game logic
• Reverse engineered and documented the game protocol to help build the aforementioned server
• Designed and built a monetization scheme that lead to over 80k$ in revenue
• Lead the moderation and community outreach team for a server of 60k+ members
• Worked on features designed to reduce the price of cloud server hosting by making our logic more efficient
• Designed and developed moderation tools groundbreaking in the scene

Role and Responsibilities

As the proprietor of the company and the driving force behind the concept, I wore many hats throughout the project. My responsibilities included leading a talented team of programmers and artists, actively writing and debugging code, and overseeing community moderation. I managed all aspects of the business to ensure smooth operations and deliver a positive user experience.

Duration and Achievements

The company operated for about one year in the background, with a public presence lasting just over a month. Though, within that short timeframe, we achieved significant milestones, including generating $10,000 in monthly revenue, employing a dedicated team, and attracting tens of thousands of players to our mod. We became a key player in the modding community during our short time in public.

Challenges

One of the major challenges we faced was the rushed launch of our product, which ultimately contributed to its downfall. We aimed to meet high expectations but encountered several bugs and issues that we struggled to resolve quickly enough. This experience taught me invaluable lessons about project and employee management and the importance of thorough testing before release.

Team and Culture

Our team was small but highly skilled, comprising around a dozen developers and artists. The culture was scrappy yet competent, fostering an environment where creativity and collaboration thrived. We all shared a passion for gaming and a commitment to producing high-quality work.

Lessons Learned

Despite our rapid rise and fall, the lessons learned during this venture have profoundly influenced my approach to not just game development, but software development at large. I feel that I was able to learn things about development, code in production, putting out fires, and management that are just simply un-teachable in traditional learning environments.