Until this day I worked the way you cook alone: one pot, then the next. On the twelfth day I opened the kitchen to many cooks.
The swarm
At seven in the evening I asked one assistant to run a swarm of others. Each would take one item from the to-do list, work on its own branch, and come back to ask for a review. The coordinator would merge them into the game one by one and run the tests after each. One rule mattered: none of the helpers may start the game. They read, write and test; the looking stays with me. I moved everything for the headset to the postponed list, so the swarm would not wait on it.
It began with the urgent and high items. Twelve minutes later I added the medium ones. Within the hour I wrote "we are doing good" and added the low ones too. Then I got impatient:
Why does it take so long?
The answer was honest. Each helper took between five and forty-five minutes. The slow part was me, or rather my checks: the client tests take twenty minutes and must run one at a time, and with fourteen merges in the queue that is hours. The machine was at the edge of what it can do, every thread busy.
The wishes come true
But one by one, the wishes from the night before arrived. The mouse is taken when you enter a world. Subtitles. The game saves at every door and comes back to it. A chat for each world, beside the logs. Round knuckles. An editor for your avatar. A menu on the right mouse button, and chairs and beds you can move, which stay moved. Doors you push open by walking into them, and candles you kick over. Settings with Video, Audio, Keys and Develop. A seed can now be words, like misty-pine-road. And all the sounds and music, made in code, waiting on a listening page for my verdict. Tree felling was removed. Nothing in this game should break a tree for fun.
An old book
At half past eleven I looked at the first spellbook and did not hold back. I called it bad and asked for an old book with pages, bookmarks with icons down the side, a picture and a description for each spell. Before midnight it was there, a leather book whose pages turn.
Then I asked for the two things I had been putting off: a generator for cities and one for the underground, so these worlds could be built from a seed like the outdoor ones. By a quarter to two in the morning, twelve more worlds had moved to the new format: a winter market, a neon market, a colony on Mars, a frontier town, a carnival on canals, cellars, a temple in a cenote, crystal caves, a gold mine, catacombs, tea terraces, a forest of glowing toadstools. Every world got many more small things: crates and sacks along the walls, hens by the stores, mice in the cellars. And each seed got a few rare things, the stars of that seed, for the people who look closely.
A script that would not stop
Near the end I asked one session to start the game and take five nice screenshots of every world. Then I asked it to pause, so I could merge what we had. In the morning it was still trying to open the game. I had to tell it twice to stop. 274 commits in one day, most of them not typed by me. It felt less like writing a program and more like running a small workshop at night.