Developer of Braid (XboxLiveArcade) - Indie game.

Demo looked really nice.  Painted hand-drawn art style.  Intelligent story driven 2d platformer.  Time rewind feature.  Death -> Pause (go back and try again). 

110 bug fixes needed before it ships.  None of them are anything to do with the game -> TCR handling.

500 items on game to do list ... and growing. 

3 years work for 1 small downloadable game.  What next?  Do it again?  Give it up for a big corp?  See Molly Rocket “About” page.  Compare to EA’s “About” page (info.ea.com).

Programming / Design / Production -> consider -> Volume/ Barrier to Entry / Improvability / Purpose

• by Volume:  Programming (Most) / Art (Half that) / Design (Less)  / Production (Least)
  
• by Barrier to Entry: Programming (Hardest) / Design (Easy) / Production (Harder)
  failure in each category has corresponding levels of fatality to the game
  
• by "Improvability":  Programming (easy) / Design (hardest) / Production (hard)
  opposite to barrier to entry
  

Rate of change -> poof Combat (1977) vs TF2 (2007).  Design is, ~100x(?), programming ~(2000)x(?)!

by Purpose: Programming (somewhat easy) / Design (very Hard) / Production (somewhat hard) - Johnathan’s personal motivation for going them.  Ie, design is the root, production and programming are just a means to and end (the implementation of the design).

Life is more than lists of tasks.  There are many things you could be doing with your time.  You need to have a good reason to do the things you do.