I needed to play it a lot, and get feedback because I wasn't playing anyone else's games. It just grew by itself. With Beta One, there was a really small community. It just blew up after about Beta Six or Five. I think that the most important thing is if you keep releasing new versions, it keeps the interest going.
People tell their friends, and that sort of thing, and it just grows and grows.
If you just release one version and you expect people to like that one version, it's hard to get a community that way. There was really no difficult part, just time-consuming parts that I would rather not do again. For instance, doing the models was super time-consuming, tedious work. Actually, if there was a difficult part, it would have to be the initial Beta One coding because it was my first time working with the Half-Life code. Usually, your first time, you just make a lot of mistakes.