In the coming days, I'll tell my friends about how a website announced the release of its new project, and this project is pretty much what colleagues and I have been working on for the past month. Some of my friends will likely tell me that there's nothing new under the sun, that there's no reason to stop working on my own stuff.  It's true, to a point.
 
Still, the project is very close to ours in its design goals, it's robust, and it's got a decent following already. When you dream about making a game, or writing, you know that (unless you're consumed by your own self-importance) you're building on what's come before, but that maybe you'll get that extra bit of recognition for taking that next step. Whether the project continues will have a lot to do with whether we can differentiate ourselves from this thing, or market the idea in such a way to bypass direct comparisons. Unfortunately, it's not the kind of thing you can just tell yourself is going to disappear after release, since it's as much a platform as it is a product.
 
And yet, between writing the paragraph above and this one, I found something that is fundamentally different between our project and theirs, something that broke that looming depression and told me I could at least compete, if not be the only person with a cool sign to wave overhead. This tiny difference meant that the way the player will interact with it gives rise to uncertainty and nebulous pacing, while ours is... something else. Maybe they're on the right track for how to make money on something like this? Maybe I'm setting myself up to be exhausted? I don't know, but I will say that the surge of encouragement I got from this fact makes up for whatever exhaustion there may be.
 
I'd like to say there's a lesson here, and I guess there is, but it's not the point of writing any of this, or even posting the blog after that sudden turn of events killed my original reason for starting. I will take this chance, though, to remind people who, like me, are ready for the sky to fall: keep your eyes open. If the sky's not really falling, you'll realize it eventually. And if it really happens to start falling, you'll at least be able to avoid chunks of sky.