I hate flying. 

More specifically, I hate landing.  It’s scary to plummet down from the safety of your 36k-foot cruising altitude and slam back down to the ground.  The ground is hard and real and immovable. 

To put it another way - nobody ever died from bad flying, but bad landings are another story.

Finishing a game can be kind of like landing that jumbo jet.  There’s a lot of safety up there in the clouds, in the realm of goals, ideas and intentions.  Landing those ambitions is a different kind of challenge. 

And just like in real life, it’s sometimes easier to circle the airport for just… one … more … loop…

Just like landing a plane, when you are closing out a game you start to really feel the physics of flight more acutely.  All those design ideas that propelled you for months? They now push you back against your chair in an acceleration of bug fixes.  That marketing strategy you thought was going to guarantee a safe touchdown?  Tradewinds have pushed you off-course – time to re-calibrate and adjust trajectory to focus on that sweet spot of game appeal your potential players need to understand.

Touching down a hit game means flawless coordination and trust on a team – so many tiny parts have to function perfectly for that jet to kiss the runway with just the right amount of speed and timing.  Tiny decisions across a network of dozens of people combine in sync to prevent disaster.

OK – so launching a game isn’t as dangerous or heroic as being a pilot, but hey: you get the point. In an App Store with 40k+ choices, the difference between a good landing and a bad one can mean the difference between arrival and survival.

Skies are busy at ngmoco these days.

-Matt