Summer of Cord

Each summer for the past several years, the house gets extra quiet due to a sudden change in routine.

While my stepdaughter visits her father in Canada, my wife and son pack their bags and head out into the world. Airports replace home life. Mountain air replaces the Texas heat. They spend weeks exploring places shared through a near-constant drip-feed of photos and phone calls from ever-changing time zones.

And I remain home, a game developer, during what my friends have now coined the "Summer of Cord."

Essentially, it's mainly just me and the dog.

Dog Days of Summer

Holding down the fort.

It’s a very unique arrangement, and--on paper--it seems almost perfect.

My wife gets to travel, the thing she loves most, growing the incredible enterprise she’s built from the ground up. She and Max get to see the world, spending time with her extended family, exploring new cultures, creating lifelong memories through experiences inaccessible to most. She gets to be the worldly, adventurous, curious person I fell in love with.

Meanwhile, I get to chase a dream of my own.

Every morning I sit at my desk to continue building Always in Mind.

I review levels, move assets, check logic.

Analyze story structure. Rewrite dialogue.

Tune mechanics.

Playtest.

Break things.

Fix things.

Experiment with particle effects until they feel almost magical.

Adjust cameras and lighting and post effects to push our cinematic flare.

Spend hours tuning variables to make sledding just a little more immersive.

And manage an incredible team scattered across the globe through frequent meetings and constant discord discussion.

Chip.

Chip.

Chip.

Toward something none of us could build on our own.

It’s meaningful work.

It’s the work I’ve always wanted to do.

So why, this summer especially, has it felt like it isn’t enough?

Maybe it’s the headlines.

Maybe it’s watching studio after studio disappear.

Maybe it’s seeing talented friends wonder whether they’ll ever work in games again.

Or maybe it’s something that’s been quietly happening to all of us.

Somewhere along the way, “doing your best” stopped feeling sufficient.

It used to be enough to wake up excited.

To encourage the people around you.

To solve a few hard problems.

To chase one ridiculous idea that might actually work.

To make today’s version a little better than yesterday’s.

But lately it feels like every day demands a miracle.

Not improvement.

Reinvention.

Not progress.

Perfection.

As if somewhere out there another game, another studio, another algorithm is sprinting ahead while we’re carefully sanding the edges off our creation.

I catch myself believing ridiculous things.

That if I don’t discover the perfect gameplay mechanic…

the perfect line of dialogue…

the perfect emotional twist…

the perfect bit of symbolism…

then I'll have personally failed everyone who’s counting on me.

Anyone can see that that’s irrational thinking.

No one person determines the fate of a studio like ours.

But, rational or not, these feelings arrive, complicated further by worries about AI.

Rapid advancements have disrupted the world, quietly changing how creatives measure themselves.

When almost anything can be generated instantly, effort can begin to feel invisible.

Craftsmanship becomes harder to recognize.

You might spend weeks or months refining something only to wonder whether the world will assume it took just thirty seconds and a prompt.

It’s a strange feeling.

You're left wondering whether people still value human work.

Whether they appreciate craftsmanship, or have succumbed to the idea that "content" is a catch-all, and "derivative" does the job.

As this “Summer of Cord” comes to an end, I’m surprised by another feeling.

Despite all these doubts…

I’m still beaming with pride.

Not because I accomplished everything I wanted.

I didn’t.

Not because the game is finished.

It isn’t.

Not because I discovered miracles every day.

Alas, they remain in short supply.

I’m proud because I showed up.

Again.

And again.

And again.

As did everyone else on this team.

Real people in this real world doing real work every day.

People who debate ideas and share their opinions.

Who make each other laugh.

Who challenge one another in respectful ways.

Who inspire with words, images, thoughts and anecdotes.

People who notice and appreciate the tiniest of details.

Who stay up late trying one more solution because they genuinely believe it’ll improve an important facet of the game.

Those moments don’t happen because someone wrote the perfect prompt.

They happen because people spend enough time together to trust one another.

Technology can accelerate creation.

But it can’t replace shared purpose.

It can’t replace friendship, camaraderie, or humility.

It can’t replace the strange joy of watching an idea slowly becoming something real because a group of people refused to let go of it.

So here’s to what's next for us, just after this Summer of Cord.

Here’s to more pride.

Less dread.

Less comparison.

Less feeling lesser.

It's more important than ever to remember why I built this team to help me create this game, and why they could never be replaced with a prompt.