Post Release Blues: A Theory

A friend of mine and fellow OUYA developer recently posted a write-up on the "Post Release Blues." I think he did a great job of describing one theory about what goes into and what results from the post release blues. I've been mulling over the post-release blues for some time now. The main reason is because I've been hit hard around the release of Super Pixalo and finishing up my last year of college.

You can make an argument that it's a spiritual deficiency, not enough working out, you need to eat right, you need to get off the computer and a million other "bandaid" solutions. I, on the other hand, have a scientific explanation as to what I personally believe causes the "post release blues". Now, I realize that this doesn't explain it for everyone, and it isn't really a solution at all: just a theory.

Basically the week before I released Super Pixalo on the OUYA, I was in a constant high and had huge amounts of adrenaline. TinyPixxels streamed the game a few days before launch, it was featured in the OUYA email blast, and the community was really excited about it. Along with all the community excitement, was the larger amount of personal sense of accomplishment for completing an entire video game myself. Totally amazing!

The week the game launched was another big bunch of highs as I started the week graduating college, and then right into the game coming out a few days early. The whole week of launch reviews are coming out, bugs are being addressed, community questions are being answered and sales are boomin'.

Obviously two weeks of constant happy high is gonna come to an end and for me that was 1 week after launch. Nothing changed for me externally; very few negative reviews, sales were good (for my expectations), and there was a lot of community excitement about what's next for Super Pixalo.

What did change is suddenly there was no more constant flow of stimulation. There wasn't anymore streams or sales or anything like that to sustain the high level of excitement after those two weeks. Suddenly I felt depressed, empty, and just purposeless. This bothered me for a week or so as I tried to make sense of this downward spiral of feelings that I suddenly had. It finally dawned on me why I might've been feeling this way: my body had gotten used to the high amount of "happy feelings" I was having so it just normalized to that level of "happy chemicals" in my brain. As soon as all the stimulation subsided, my body was still producing the "happy chemicals" as much as it felt it needed to as if I was still being externally "happified." If that doesn't make sense, let me try explaining it again.

During High: External Stimulus + Happy Chemicals = Happy Body

Body Normalizes: External stimulus means body doesn't feel it needs to make as much Happy Chemicals

Post High: External stimulus dies down significantly but body is still only producing a lessened balance of Happy Chemicals.

For me, this means that after a few weeks I feel back to normal. A month later my wife gave birth to our handsome little son named Ender and now life is pretty focused on baby and working on other side projects.

I think the post release blues are mostly a chemical thing. It sure was for me. I'm very interested to hear from other developers about their "post release blues" experiences, so feel free to comment below!

You can grab Super Pixalo in Early Access over at Itch.io and vote yes on Steam Greenlight.