Warning: This is an incomplete draft. I haven’t found time to edit this down and fix mistakes yet.

Starting at the beginning of high school, through my few years of college, and into the first year of my professional career, I spent a significant portion of my free time building and maintaining a toolset and game engine called Fury². It was built as a way for me to quickly prototype games and ideas, to learn about game design and engine design, and most importantly, to let me build games that I didn’t think I could create using any of the tools that were already out there.
It was a long and painful development project, and by the end, I realized that I had made numerous mistakes; despite that, I also gained many valuable lessons and learned things that I might not have learned any other way, and with the clearer perspective that hindsight brings, I consider it one of the things that made it possible for me to start a career doing things that I love without having to struggle with debt or worry about how I’m going to afford my next meal. For me, this project embodies the famous Nietzsche quote, ‘What does not kill me, makes me stronger‘.

Learning how much sheer effort goes into the process of creating even a simple piece of software has changed me for the better in many ways, so I’m writing this article in hopes that I can share some of the lessons I’ve learned with others. Unfortunately, the benefit of hindsight also brings with it the fact that I don’t remember many of the things that happened during the 8 or so years I spent developing the project. I hope that despite this, you can benefit from what I’ve learned as much as I have.

Of course, I must preface the contents of this article with a warning: It’s written in fairly technical terminology, and does not have any particular narrative structure. I have tried to compile the most important issues and triumphs from the history of the project, and present them in a form that a programmer can understand. Regardless of whether you’re a programmer or not, I encourage you to respond via email or comments and let me know what parts of this you couldn’t understand, so that I can improve this article and make it worthy of your time.

- Kevin Gadd