Every good idea we've had this month has tried to kill the project. I mean that almost literally.
Here's the trap, and it's the opposite of the one I usually write about. Killing a bad thing is easy. What I'm learning is harder is
not adding a good one. Because they don't arrive looking like danger. They arrive as "wouldn't it be cool if," said with a grin, usually near the end of a good day when the thing is finally working and everyone's a bit high on it.
And they
would be cool. That's the whole problem. Every one of those sentences is a genuinely nice idea. A little extra system here. A clever wrinkle there. A mode we don't strictly need but that would make a certain kind of player very happy. Individually, all reasonable. All easy to say yes to in the moment, because saying yes feels generous and saying no feels small.
Then you look up a month later and the thing you set out to make is buried under six things you
also decided to make, none of them finished, all of them competing for the same tiny pile of hours you were counting so carefully.
A big studio can absorb some of this. They've got the people and the runway to chase a few side quests and still ship. We don't. For us, every yes to a new idea is a silent no to finishing the core — it just doesn't announce itself that way. The cost is invisible until it's enormous.
So we've started doing something that feels almost rude. When one of those "wouldn't it be cool if" ideas shows up, we write it down — and then we don't do it. There's a list now. A parking lot for good ideas we're deliberately not building. It's weirdly painful. You're looking at a genuinely nice thing you thought of, and choosing to leave it on the shelf, maybe forever.
But the list does two jobs. It gets the idea out of your head so it stops nagging, and it protects the one thing we actually have to get right. Because a small studio doesn't win by doing more things. It wins by doing one thing until it's undeniable, and having the discipline to ignore the eleven prettier things whispering from the sidelines.
Most of that parking lot will never get built. I've made my peace with that. A game is as much the shape of what you left out as what you left in.
The core, meanwhile, is getting sharper by the week — partly
because we keep refusing to feed it distractions.
Anyway. Someone just said "wouldn't it be cool if." Straight to the list.
— Thiago & the Pixel Sprout team
Posted by Thiago Moreira · July 21, 2026
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