I finished it two days early, and I did not choose a single thing that is in it.
Two weeks ago somebody I have never met found my game on his own, played it, and sent me four things that were wrong. Somebody else used the report form inside the game four times.
I wrote back and gave him a date. The thirteenth of September. Nobody had asked me for one. No team is waiting on it, no store queue. I could have written soon and nothing would have been different.
It is the eleventh and it is done.
For fourteen months I decided what to build. I had a roadmap, I was proud of it, and it is sitting exactly where it was on the first of September.
Their list was better than mine
Mine had three new systems on it, the kind you write a devlog about. Theirs had this.
You cannot cancel a training run you started by accident. You cannot tell that the office is not for sale yet, and cannot skip thirty seconds of text you have already read.
Not one of those is interesting to build. All of them are the reason somebody closes a game and does not come back.
Here is the scar, and it is not a bug
Of their four I gave a date to three. For the fourth I wrote it was harder than expected, and would land in the next release or the one after. The three with a date are finished. The one without has not moved at all.
A vague promise is the only kind that can quietly not happen.
It goes out on Sunday. Taxi until then.
Have you ever shipped a week you did not choose, and was it better than the one you had planned?