The Plan

Part of me hesitates at this – we are used to seeing companies hold all the information tight until the very last possible moment. But, Dive Buddies is not directly competing with any product that we are tracking, and we want to build excitement and bring you along throughout the development process.

To be clear, this timeline is based on what is feasible if we are doing this whole project without any additional employees. Even with additional employees, we will likely stick to this timeframe to provide ample time to play test and conduct sufficient QA/fixing to ensure the release is solid.

As a project without any current revenue (and mounting expenses), we are looking at an application for a MegaGrant and a Kickstarter campaign shortly after completing the Vertical Slice / Demo in Spring ‘26. If you think this project looks cool, please spread the word and help build the excitement leading to this campaign!

By the time we are halfway through production, we are planning to attend both game and scuba conferences to build awareness, promote wishlisting, and seek agreements for potential future projects.

If the campaign and/or grant are successful enough, we hope to be able to hire a few additional developers by Summer ‘26 (most notably an artist to provide both creatures and undersea environment objects, and QA to ensure we are finding and addressing issues before they affect our players). I have seen a lot of talented developers overlooked due to a focus on experience over potential – we are building a team, so what we need are excited devs with long-term potential. To this point, we are all working on this project for free – but this is something we need to fix before we bring new talent in. If we are going to do our best for our players, we need to do our best for our devs as well.

I hope to share more of the prototyping and development in the coming weeks (which is to say: I hope I can focus more on the project and less on the business-building aspects). Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions and we will do our best to respond.

Thanks again for following along on this adventure!