Project Waldo

There's a period at the beginning of every new project when you can see the beauty in your creation, but nobody else can. It's like beer goggles, but without beer. Art goggles. It's just a matter of fact: you have the beautiful idea, but it's locked inside your head. You start to build a replica of that idea in the real world, and for some period of time, nobody else will be able to see what you see. Your closest friends will be politely encouraging, but you can tell the difference between genuine enthusiasm and socially-mandated support. People who aren't shackled by a need to maintain your friendship will be more blunt. During this phase, you will need to be an endothermic entity - you can't rely on a patch of sunshine to warm yourself, you've gotta generate the heat yourself. It's exhausting, and you will be plagued by self-doubt. You'll be lonely. If the thing you're making is also meant to pay your bills, all these feelings will be intensifi...

 Dan and I are working on a new project, and I'm excited about it.  Here's the elevator pitch: it's a four-player extraction FPS in which you play as a letter carrier for the Pan Galactic Postal Service. Due to overuse of FTL drives, rifts in the fabric of reality have become a feature of everyday life, with entire neighborhoods becoming immersed in Plasm, a nacreous ooze that seeps into our dimension from another, far-less-hospitable realm. The Plasm is inhabited by hostile entities, and exposure to Plasm mutates living things in our world. It's icky stuff, but it's the price we have to pay to get fresh strawberries delivered from the garden colonies of Wolf 359. A recent uptick in Plasm activity has forced the citizens of the Galactic Hegemon into lockdown, but that doesn't apply to essential workers, including the dauntless employees of the PGPS. Your mission is to deliver parcels to their proper addresses while navigating a gauntlet of mutated monstrosities,...

Here's the definition of "watershed":     1. an area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas.     2. an event or period marking a turning point in a course of action or state of affairs. It's also, coincidentally, the name of the building where I and a few dozen other developers worked on a game called Kerbal Space Program 2. I really loved that office - right in the heart of Fremont, a block away from the Burke-Gilman trail on Lake Union. Of all the memories I'll take with me from my time on that project, the most vivid will be of the summertime meetings, the "walk-and-talks," that took place outdoors on the trail. Those are happy memories. Of course not all of my memories from that project are happy - for nearly seven years, I helped to push against a boulder of tech debt and procedural complexity in service of a vision that I felt would culminate in a great game. A big part of my job was to communicate - bot...