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Like a rug woven with a missed stitch, or a Kintsugi bowl with gold-inlaid cracks , I wanted to let the imperfections in this next game shine through. Instead of treating each misstep in my coding as a bug, I tried to see it as a feature and let it shape where the game would go next. The imperfections don’t stand in the way of the “true” version of the game, they are the game.

In my daily life, this is not something that comes easily to me. I’ll often hold a perfect image of something in my head, and then have trouble adjusting when the actuality of the thing is totally different. For example, I’ll wake up and tell myself that today I’ll feel absolutely great, and edit a blog post, and make progress on a game, and send all those emails to vendors for our wedding, and then have time to shop for groceries and make lunch for tomorrow. Then one o’clock rolls around, and I’ve got a headache that needs me to take my medicine and simply rest. I’m not going to be able to do half the things I thought I would, and I can either roll with that reality or get mad at it.

Perfectionism is not accepting the distance between the idea of a thing and the actual thing. Before I started this game, I had a definite vision for how it would turn out. As the game took shape, it veered from that vision. It’s different than I thought, and it’s not perfect. I can choose whether to fight against that difference or accept it and share it with you.

So here it is.