In an effort to publish more blogs, I am publishing the outline for this post instead of the full blog post / essay version.

These were my reflections right after finishing FlipTales:
1 - Benefits of developing a project over a long amount of time - willingness to delete half the content multiple times in a row
2 - Having full creative control of a project felt extremely good. It was very frustrating to always work on projects that had a ton of chefs in the kitchen.
3 - Having the luxury to be picky about what feedback I incorporated and waiting to give it until I slept on it
4 - Design is just 25% of the equation, max. If you focus on just design, your project will do 25% as well that have someone focusing on other parts of the project. This is a good thing. You have a specialty, take pride in it.
5 - Designing a game is all it takes to be a game designer. I sometimes felt imposter syndrome, but at the end of the day, if people have a ton of fun playing your game - hey! You're a real game designer.
6 - Many game designers consider writing rules, packaging, and graphic design as someone else's job. This creates a massive opportunity for generalists who are interested in designing everything holistically.
7 - Accessibility has many benefits other than the game being easy for folks with disabilities to play. For one, it makes the game easier to play and learn for everyone (and hence, more fun). It also makes the game easier for folks with different language backgrounds or cultural backgrounds to connect over the game.
8 - Having physical copies of my game felt amazing, I needed to accept this is part of who I am as a designer. It would have been easier to make it a digital / PDF game but that's just not aligned with my interests / values and that's cool!
9 - People can tell when you loved making something.
10 - Shift your mindset to seeing other talented people and thinking "aw man, I'm not as good as them" to "hm, how can I hire them to work on my project?"

And these are my reflections 4 years after that:
1 - I focused too much on the "product" and not enough on the people who I wanted to play it. In hindsight, I shouldn't have approached research as validated if my design goals were met - I should have been researching the full lifecycle of people's lives before, during, and after buying FlipTales. It's only natural that I started out laser focused on the product, but ultimately I think it's just not enough to reach your design goals as a designer if you want your work to reach a wider audience (which to be fair - need not be everyone's goal - but it is something I care about now).
2 - The bar for excellence is not "That was fun!" it's "Wait can I buy this?" and then a day later you receive an email from their friend... and an email from their friend's friend, and next thing you know you're stressing out about how you're going to make all these people happy and make enough copies of the game. If you feel like you have to "pitch" your game to people and push a boulder uphill, you haven't cracked it yet. Great experiences sound too good to be true to people when you first tell them about it.
Like, if I were to approach designing a roleplaying game now, I'd interview hardcore D&D fans and ask them "what's something you wish could be better about D&D but will probably never be possible?" Then I would get to work on those aspects. To be fair, my own answers to this question were my inspiration for starting FlipTales, but I think I weighed my own opinions too heavily. I believe in hindsight that "rules light RPG with different fun creatures and classes" is not the kind of thing that makes people go crazy. Part of this is the marketing and storytelling, and I wish I hadn't viewed that as a deterministic aspect of the product
3 - Marketing isn't just describing the thing you're selling. When I made FlipTales, I thought marketing didn't matter that much, and I viewed it as a kind of scummy / salesy / grifty discipline for English majors who wanted to make money (sorry!), but now I see it completely differently. Now, I see marketing as an important part of the product experience. For example, I should have focused more on how FlipTales is for people who want to spend more time playing roleplaying games, with more people. The different creatures and classes were a big emphasis in my marketing of the game, because I loved them, but that's not what made FlipTales different in the market. The messaging I tried which emphasized you could play it with family did better than some of the other messaging I tried, which is aligned with this, but I should have explored this much more.
4 - I really should have prioritized making a team out of FlipTales more. I was very much doing FlipTales to prove to myself that I could make a well-designed product, and I do think that this was a success, so I'm not mad at myself for "Lone Wolf"-ing it (shoutout Amit for adding that to my lexicon). But in hindsight, I was really limiting myself to put everything on my shoulders. It led to burnout, which led to development stopping. If I had a bigger team that complimented my skillset better, we'd probably have had a better brand and marketing, and it might have made a larger impact.
5 - Instead of treating the Kickstarter as the end of the project, I should have thought of it as the beginning. Now, I did think of it as a beginning in some respects, by planning updates, etc. But to be honest, I really just wanted the stress to stop. In hindsight, I wish I had made a tracker that meticulously tracked delivery of each unit, and tracking if the person had gotten a game in, made custom stories, published them to the website, etc. I think it would have helped grow a community which could have grown into a brand and product with real staying power.

A lot of these learnings have inspired my work at Sudowrite and on Poetry Camera, and I am so grateful to this project and everyone who collaborated with me on it or bought a copy. Fun fact: when I interviewed for a job with Google, the project I spent the most time discussing was FlipTales. You never know how exactly your passion will benefit you in the long term, but I believe it always does if you are patient.