Ezequiel

you should not be a 10x engineer or whatever, you should be focusing on the vision and ideas and emotions that make your project interesting and beautiful and touching. some of the greatest indie games of all time have absolutely nightmarish codebases because the creator was rightly focused on the player experience

if it shipped, it works

inside each of us there are two wolves. our goal is to not be devoured by either.

from our "do just enough to ship" wolf we get the wisdom that sometimes you just gotta accept certain limitations, buckle down and get it done - after all, the whole reason you're making something is to bring a cool new experience into being, right? so don't overthink things, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, know when to call something done, and don't rewrite endlessly - you can roll everything you learned into the next project. the pitfall here is that it can so easily become "work harder, not smarter", and next thing you know you've run an entire marathon in clown shoes (that you made at the very beginning of the project!) and you're left with a project that was some combination of harder to make, longer to make, is now difficult or impossible to maintain (maybe even small fixes for issues players find) and didn't actually teach you that much aside from "yeesh, don't do any of that again". indie games especially are riddled with hustle culture thinking and massive survivorship bias, so it's easy to look at the gnarly code for some highly successful game and think "it's okay that my stuff looks like that, right?" - well, maybe. but what you're not seeing are the 100s of gnarly codebases that never shipped and/or burnt out their creators as they collapsed under their own weight.

nor are you seeing the codebases that never progressed beyond "really smart, solid framework that took years to put together"! from our "doing things the right way" wolf we get the very noble introspective impulse that there is usually a smarter, more powerful way we could be doing something. for my Capcom VS Everyone bot, the process of putting together the initial inspiration image (which now serves as the bot page's header) in GNU IMP by manually picking out web image search results, then cropping and scaling them to fit into the mosaic, convinced me that i would never be able to make the core gag (literally 1000s of characters) work without building a custom tool that made adding each single character take <=10 seconds. (i really need to make a video showing off this tool someday, i'm proud of it.) if i'd listened to my inner pragmatic programmer and written off that tool as simply "nice to have", a kind of distraction, i probably would've spent a whole day hand-editing images and JSON to get about 100 characters into the corpus and then given up, concluding the labor was too great. with the tool, i can add several dozen characters in a brief session, and it's easy and fun. there was a smarter way to do it, with a non-trivial time cost, but i did it and it paid off; the bot never would have shipped without it.

so my boring middle ground conclusion is that it depends. i think the key thing is to understand yourself, and how vulnerable you are to either of these temptations, on a given project, and from under each of the different hats you must wear as a solo / tiny team creator. always be looking for ways to become better at making things, and always hold on to your passion for making (and finishing) something compelling. i don't see those as contradictory in any way. good luck with your wolves. and be kind to yourself.

Whenever I see these positions, these kinds of conversations about what should or shouldn't be done in the name of making things I tend to want to ask which side of the conversation is the one that gets made feel illegitimate, which needs to hear that their work is valid too? Are People Who Code Correctly likely to be people in need of encouragement?

It comes up a lot in writing. While trying to encourage people who aren't necessarily 'good' writers yet, who don't have practice, I would often advocate that short stories, a page of a story, was still a story, and that's good because it was practice that could let you make harder, more complicated things. And inevitably, when I made that kind of post, I'd have someone - usually well meaning - show up in the responses, where my advice was being presented, to advocate that hey, also, if you want to write three volume doorstoppers with ten pages of glossary in the opening of the book and all, you should do that and like...

I get it! There are two sides, maybe one of these conversations really needs someone to advocate for another, different thing than what I said. I tried very hard to not shout at the people who did that, though. Because 'well sometimes it depends' is almost anti-advice, in the same way that 'huge, well developed, elaborate and difficult to make stories need validation too' is.

I don't imagine there are a lot of people with imposter syndrome ashamed to share their work or embarrassed about being included and making things because they're too good at doing things the technically correct way. Those folk are probably more discouraged by other things.

i don't always make a great habit out of filling in every techo i get, but i really love them as objects & spaces for potential thought to go as i track the year

my last one was a cute astro boy themed cover & this year i was especially taken with one following the design of my favorite statue (structure?) of all time: the incredible tower of the sun... every facet of it is such a spectacle in person & seeing it was one of my many highlights of living in osaka for a while

i'm really pleased to add another little aspect of my fandom around a giant piece of public art~

unrelated reminder that i took the creepiest pictures of the tower of the sun known to man

They also sell tower of the sun mini figures in the nearby gachapon machine.

wait twitch snitches on you if you're watching a stream muted? what the hell? I was vaguely aware you don't count as a viewer if you're muted but highlighting that in chat is fucking weird. I guess the workaround is to mute your browser tab and keep the volume at full