Posted On: 2026-07-06
I've settled into a familiar cadence using the new issue tracker. Each week I pick out a group of issues to tackle, including "stretch" goals in case I get done early, and at the end of the week I put any unfinished work away - either returning it to the backlog or marking it as "won't" (due to de-prioritization.) Occasionally, however, I'll have a week like last week: after spending the bulk of the week working on a single (very large) goal, I've made a substantial amount of progress, but it isn't in a state where I can include it in the project. I don't have any particular strategy for how to address it when that happens, and my approach runs the gamut - pulling work forward from one week to the next, cutting the unfinished work, or even just leaving it to languish in its partially unfinished state*. Last week, however, I took perhaps the strangest approach of all: for the first time in months, I stopped working on the game and just played it for fun.
Playing a game for fun might not seem like a particularly odd thing to do, but it's actually quite hard when making the game. Simply playing the game is not the unusual part - I do that with every commit to make sure everything's working right - but there's a difference between playing with a purpose* and playing for fun. Playing for fun requires "turning off" my designer mindset: I can't think about balance issues or bugs that I uncover or any number of other things I might normally notice while playing someone else's game for fun, because the knowledge that I'm the one responsible for tracking and resolving every issue reflexively puts me into "work" mode. Playing for fun also means that I can, and will, stop playing when I am no longer having fun, and the fact that a big part of the fun of games (for me) is discovering new things means that the more carefully I design my own games, the harder it is for me to have fun**.
Playing my own game for fun turned out to be the perfect move for where I was on the task: technically working, but not yet polished to a shine, the new mechanics had some underlying issues that emerged through unstructured play. Despite passing "fun" tests early on, seeing them through the lens of continuous, joy-driven play revealed that they detracted from the fun of other parts of the game, and were not fun enough on their own to make up the difference. By the time I stopped, I was convinced the new mechanics needed a complete overhaul - if not outright removal.
The sunk cost fallacy is hard enough to cope with on its own, but the fact that many games are made by iterating on the bad until it becomes good makes things even more difficult. Over the weekend I sketched out a set of changes that could (possibly) improve things, but as I look at how to approach this week's responsibilities I'm doubting whether I should even try. Losing a week's worth of work certainly feels bad, but this break between weeks, and the lessons learned from the impromptu play session could save me from losing far more than that.
At this moment, I don't actually know what I will do. When I first sat down to write this, I'd assumed that those changes would fix everything, but writing this all out makes me realize that's a gamble, and - with how stuffed the backlog currently is - to chase this is to bet that fixing this is not only possible, but outright essential to finishing development.
While that's not exactly the note I'd originally planned to end on, I think it's good to be transparent about where I am at the moment. Today is my planning day for the week, after all - if writing this post and reassessing the lessons that I've learned makes this week's plan better, then that's certainly something I don't want to give up. So, thank you for reading, but I've now got some (re)planning to do.