My last mistake as a project lead wasn’t technical, it was emotional

As I wrote in my last post, between 2020 and 2022 I couldn’t spend much time on the project. I just had moved to another city on my own, started working in another company and I didn’t have enough energy to keep coding after my 9-to-5 job.

It wasn’t until March 2022, after a long vacation, that I finally picked it up again. The translators had done a great work translating 90% of the texts, and it was time to finish the images romhacking.

That year, with the help of Darkc0m, we made a great push for a special Christmas livestream.

After that (2023), some of the team moved to other projects. And besides some graphic design work, the only progress we made was pure technical, so the project progress felt stuck.

The Fear of being unfair

Tradusquare, our fan-translation community, is made purely of volunteers. We don’t get paid, we don’t pay people, and the translations are always free.

That’s why I always thought that it wasn’t fair to ask for more. I had been gone for a couple of years, and I felt I didn’t have the right to demand more involvement.

They were not mad at all, I mentioned this from time to time and they reminded me that we were doing this for fun. But deep down, I felt guilty. I was pushing the project, but it felt like I was failing.

Getting the motivation back

Last year I decided to go all in. I wanted to finish all the technical bottlenecks and starting translating on my own, as we had a lot of English left. With that, I was convinced that I could get the team’s focus back.

And it worked. After months of work, I made a post with some fully translated screenshots of the game. It was the first time we could see the game with no Japanese or English, and this got enough attraction to start the fire again.

I started organizing the remaining work and distributing to the newcomers, and even translating some files myself. I realized how people were talking again about the project, outside friends were asking to join, and more and more I was feeling connected to the community. Where the last couple of years I was feeling an outsider.

Building together

Looking back at these months, I can see how my own insecurities blurred my perspective. Instead of looking for more people (something I could have easily done), I spent too much time worrying because the team were not active anymore. I focused on the technical side (which was necessary) but I now understand that what really keeps a project alive is not progress, it’s connection.

Seeing the team motivated again, new people joining, and the chat coming back to life reminded me why I started this in the first place. I used to think the goal was finishing the project, but now I think the real success is seeing everyone excited to build it together.

Now I believe next year might finally be the one. But honestly, that doesn’t matter that much to me now:

I remember why I learned to code, and why I started building projects.