The last few weeks have been a strange mix of excitement and frustration.
Neon Chain is finished. Or at least, it's finished enough that the only thing standing between me and releasing it is Google. Every morning I check my email hoping to see "Your app is now live on Google Play," and every morning I end up opening some other email that gets my hopes up for a few seconds before reality sets back in. I knew the review process would take time, but knowing something intellectually and living through it emotionally are two very different things.
The weird part is that while Neon Chain sits in limbo, life doesn't stop.
Terminal Ghost keeps pulling me back in. Every time I think I've solved one problem, I discover three more systems that need to exist to make the world feel believable. But honestly, that's part of what excites me about it. I'm not trying to make another Hollywood hacker game full of spinning 3D cubes and magical hacking buttons. I'm trying to build a mystery that happens to be solved through hacking, and that's a much harder problem than I originally convinced myself it would be.
At the same time, I've been putting work into the Lonely Ranch Games website, trying to make it feel like an actual game studio instead of just three guys throwing projects onto the internet and hoping something sticks. Every improvement makes me feel a little more like this crazy plan might actually work someday.
The problem is that there are only twenty-four hours in a day.
I work four days a week. I want to spend time with VantaQueen. I want to build games. I want to improve LRG. I want to write. I want to rest. And somewhere in there, I'm supposed to remember that I'm also a human being whose body occasionally reminds him that he was born with one of the worst co-op partners imaginable.
I'm slowly learning that balance isn't about finding enough time to do everything. It's about accepting that some days will belong to work, some days will belong to development, and some days need to belong to the people I love. The hard part isn't knowing that. The hard part is convincing the part of my brain that thinks every hour not spent building something is an hour wasted.
Maybe that's the real project I'm working on right now.
Not Neon Chain.
Not Terminal Ghost.
Not Lonely Ranch Games.
Learning how to build a life that has room for all of them.