If you want it to get done, you have to let go.

A lot of software development is spent making incremental progress. It doesn't always happen this way, but broadly speaking as you keep developing you're able to see your project grow in measurable ways, whether it be new features, performance improvements, or behavioral bug fixes. Having spent most of my career in open source development, this has often been coupled with rapid developer and user feedback. When you manage to fix that one bug that makes a single person's life meaningfully better for them, that feeling sticks with you, and it feels good.

Game development is almost the opposite of that.

Describing a game as "more than the sum of its parts" feels a bit trite, but it's an apt description. You really begin to feel it as you keep putting in the hours hammering out code, mucking about with pixels and polygons, staring at waveforms, and holding your head in your hands as you try to figure out why everything just broke when all you tried to do was change a number. None of that looks or feels like a game.

Many game developers will tell you that their projects, especially the big ones, basically don't come together until about 80-90% of the work is done. And if you've ever listened to any of Rami Ismail's talk you'll have likely heard him say: "The game only exists in the player's mind." These two things really hit home when you're deep into the development cycle, probably asking yourself why you're even doing this in the first place, and you get that first build that brings it all together. From there suddenly progress feels like it's accelerating, and in a very real way it is. If you look at how far this project has gone over the last 30 days, the bulk of what's presented now really only came together in the last week.

I can't stress enough that, despite all my gushing, this is not all my credit to take. Several individuals gave their talents, time, and ideas to make the various pieces both on screen and hidden in the memory of the machine. I simply put them all together and built from there.

Here's the changelog:

• It's a game

When I look back on the past three months, most of what I see is a hazy blur of events and faces, ephemeral experiences that have left their mark on me and will be washed away in the sea of time. But I will be able to look at this post, a mark I leave on the world, and know that I accomplished something I set out to do.

Happy new year.
--Jose