Perfectionism

Working on Nirvana thought me a valuable lesson: nothing you do will ever be as good as you can do it. The time to publish the game is getting closer, and sometimes I find myself polishing small things, while the big bad bugs are giving me the eye.
You can't be an Indie and make a polish, realistic game, most of the time. You have to play with the cards you have, and like I said multiple times before, the design of Nirvana was chosen with only that in mind: time-efficient puzzle building. In the early stages, the heavily modular geometry of my levels ran the risk of being monotone, and all the rooms looked the same, really. Until I played Mirror's Edge, and it gave me the idea of painting the wall with different colors - colors that the player could use to navigate, and to know if they are standing on a wall, or on the ceiling.
This design decision was important in the early stages, and since I would use the same texture for all the puzzle walls, the least I could do is make it look perfect. The wall texture, in the end, was the one to take me the most time to make, although it's the more simple.
Working on Nirvana, I learned the difference between realism and perfect simplicity.

The wall texture.

Unity 5 and what it means.

So, I have been working on this game for along time. I remember when I started playing with some gravity concepts, I was using Unity 3. The software was nice, easy to use, and as many people say, the path between the idea and the execution in Unity is really well paved. When Unity 4 was released, and introduced some more features (mainly a new animation system), Nirvana didn't suffer much. The basic idea of the game, and most of its mechanics remained unchanged, and my transition from 3 to 4 was so smooth.
Of course I learned Mecanim, the new introduced feature, you never know when you're gonna need a good animation pipeline, right? But one thing my game have in common with the Half-Life series, is that I don't have a character model to be animated, so I was satisfied with the bug fixes, and all the minor new features I could use.
Until early march, this year, when Unity 5 was finally released.
Democratization of game creation. This was the policy for Unity from the beginning. Everyone can be a game designer, if you have the talent, and if you have the dedication to work for it. The new standard shader, the new global illumination, the new physics engine, the new audio mixing system... the new Unity that changed my game from something personal and minimalist, to something personal and beautiful.
Thank you, Unity Technologies, for making this engine, for making dreams come true around the world. But its not about "what they create", is about "what we create". Time to go back to work.

Nirvana: The First Travel in Unity 5.