The thirteenth day was the busiest so far, 379 commits. It ended with the game under a new name. But it started with a question I had asked too many times.
Why do you fail?
The city worlds were slow, and I had asked for a fix again and again. That morning I had an idea: maybe the engine draws every stone of every house, and we should join each house into one object. Then I asked the question I really wanted answered:
I have tried already a few times to make you do that fix. Why do you fail?
The answer was plain. Nobody had measured in the real game. Every fix had been a guess that passed the tests, and the tests run without a window, so they cannot see a frame rate. So, for the first time, someone opened the window and counted. The neon market went from 23 to 46 frames a second, and the canal carnival from six and a half to twelve. About sixty percent of all the drawing was the sun's shadow, reaching far beyond where anyone would notice it. I asked why the graphics card does not do the work. It does; it was waiting for the processor to feed it, half of every frame idle. By the afternoon the shadow stayed near, each building became one mesh, as I had imagined, and there was a benchmark anyone can run.
The crash
In the afternoon I sent five helpers into the list again, bugs first. Then the computer crashed. I wrote one line: "System crashed. Please assess the damage and continue as best as you can." The main line came through whole. The five helpers picked up where they had stopped, two of them from the start. Later I asked whether I should release everything. The answer was no: the new shaders had never been seen in a window, and one typo in the shared one would break every person in every world. It was the right answer.
Spells that go too far
In the evening I sat with the spells. I wanted eleven, each with a plain version and an overcharged one. Holding a key now overcharges a spell, and the cost is stress, the game's mana: two minutes from calm to full, and at full every overcharge falls back to plain. Free Flight overcharged crashes through houses and trees, which is funny, because the day before I removed tree felling for being unkind. The first effect of too much magic was a flicker of magenta and cyan. I said it did not belong in a game about wizards. Now things waver like air over a fire, and unravel into rising motes, in a frenzy near the end.
I also removed the glove from everywhere. There will be no glove, not even in the headset. The spell is cast with bare hands.
A new name
With the overcharge, the game had two halves: a calm hunt for doors, and a free roam that can go mad. At half past eleven I wrote, "Need a new name. This is going crazy." I tried Enchanted Doors, but a door sounds like wood, and this is about portals. I asked for names that no game already has. One of the first suggestions turned out to be a released shooter. Then one name came back clean, and I took it at once:
GateCaster it is. Rename everything.
Seventy files changed, the players' saves move by themselves, and the old address sends you to the new one. Around half past one in the morning I asked for a tutorial: a wizard sitting in a chair at home, in blue jeans and round black glasses, who stands up when you greet him and asks, "Do you want to know how to become a GateCaster?"