Running my game inside an imgui window really accelerated a ton of debugging work because I could reload maps, change palettes, show debug stats, whatever completely trivially.

It also meant that I've spent over a year of this game's development without having any of the in-game mechanics for getting around ie. changing levels, restarting, quitting, all that normal game state flow stuff.

Now that I'm finally adding it all for the demo it is like nectar of the gods it is so satisfying to feel like my weird tech demo looks and acts like a dang video game.

The last time one of my game projects got this far the best way to run it was to send it to my phone so debug functionality had to be built in super early for messing with the state while the game was running. That necessitated a UI system earlier in development so you just had menus and all of the above the whole time. Never thought about what a boon that is for being able to hand your game to someone super early on.