Do the hard thing more often

When we were developing Uru the game build process was pretty complicated. We had built all of our own tools etc from scratch including 3DSMax plugins to generate game data and we also had a custom asset management system. A lot of complexity had accreted over time to make just creating a stable build of the game into a nightmare. Of course the reaction to this was initially that we didn’t do builds very often. No one wanted to spend a day wrangling all the files, running scripts and dealing with the inevitable problems.

I realized this wasn’t going to work. We needed a better and more consistent way to build the assets. IIRC the first attempt was a little app that allowed you to run each step of the process by clicking a button. This was actually a lot of progress but still wasn’t what we needed.

Any process which requires humans to intervene is not well defined enough to be part of your build. That’s obvious now but it was something we had to learn at the time. We needed a one click solution that worked and we eventually got there.

If something in your process is too hard, keep do it more often till it becomes easy.