This is a big project, the kind that eats your nights and weekends and most of your idle thoughts in the shower. So a while back I did something that turned out to be one of the best decisions of the whole build: I put my wife and cats into the game.
The real boss fight in any long solo project is staying motivated. Some days the engine fights you, framerates plummet, and a shader breaks for absolutely no logical reason. But booting up the build on those rough days and watching my wife's character smash through a horde, or seeing my cat Sushi execute her special attack "Sushi Roll", which BTW is a real trick I taught my cat to roll over and this name naturally came out of it. It makes it all worth it. It reminds me exactly why I started building this in the first place.There is also something special about handing my wife a controller and watching her play as herself. The cats do not review the build, but they are excellent supervisors, mostly from the keyboard. It has made the game feel less like a product I am shipping and more like a little world my family lives in.They are my inspiration in the literal sense now. Every time I tune a hero ability or polish a character's animation, I am thinking about getting *them* right. The bar is higher because it is personal. You want your wife to look as good as possible in the game!If you are deep in a long creative project and the fuel is running low, put something you love into it. Not as a gimmick, but as a reminder. My wife and my cats turned a sprawling, exhausting build into something I genuinely look forward to opening every day. They make me a better developer, and they make the game a better place to be.Now back to fixing that shader.