cake

Let’s say you’re part of a group that’s trying to bake the most awesome cake ever. Everybody has ideas about how to make the cake awesome. You’re all really excited about the cake.

Every day, each of you work on different elements of the recipe, bring them together, bake a test cake overnight, and come in the next morning to see how it turned out.

Some mornings, it’s pretty good. Other mornings, it’s awful. On a few memorable mornings, the oven is on fire and the cake is completely inedible.

Time goes on, and as you approach your deadline, your cake recipe is reliably decent. With so little time left, you can’t risk big changes; only small tweaks to the recipe are allowed.

Next thing you know, the deadline is tomorrow. The cake recipe isn’t perfect. In fact, it has pretty obvious flaws. But you’re out of time, so you just have to pick the best existing version of the cake and present it to the world.

Sometimes people like your cake. Sometimes they don’t. Very frequently, somebody who’s never baked anything in their life will make a smug YouTube video about how much you suck at cakes.

This is game development.