At a pace slower than glaciers, I built a tactical RPG with branching storypaths. I started building this all the way back in Fall 2005. Most nights I would log in for maybe five minutes, do some work, and then logout.  If I was feeling frisky, I might go 6, maybe 7 minutes.  

By some miracle, I actually finished the project this way.  This is... certainly not the most ideal way to develop games, but I think it shows the power of time and stubbornness to not let a project go.

I released the game on Steam as a 100% free title, last week.  Some interesting takeaways:

* It is very difficult being consistent within the game over this amount of time.  The dialogue, the art, music, everything.  I can see my skills slowly improve over time and some of that stuff I created early on no longer fits.  You end up in an endless loop of improvement while the world moves on.  This is probably a normal part of the gamedev process, but the magnitude of the differences are so much larger over a longer period of time.
* You learn to take good notes for yourself and write a lot of comments.  There were so many times I would be looking at ancient code, written a decade ago and wonder silently to myself, 'who is the idiot that wrote this and why didn't they document anything?'
* Releasing a game on Steam for free has been interesting.  People are actually very suspicious that the game is awful, else why wouldn't it have a price tag?  (well, maybe it is awful, but that's besides the point)
* I've had a ton of people add it to their library (14,000), but very few have actually played it (90).  I suspect this is mostly due to users that want to see their library count grow and vacuum up everything that is free.

It does feel pretty great to get to the finish line at long last.  Now I have to figure out what I'm going to do with my extra five minutes of free time every night.

Here is the game:

[https://store.steampowered.com/app/1581370/Into\_the\_Evernight/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1581370/Into_the_Evernight/)

20 years of five minutes a night somehow got it done