I lost about an hour this week scrolling through what other studios are posting, and I came away feeling like an absolute fraud.
You know the stuff. Gorgeous clips. Confident little breakdowns of some system that clearly took a genius eleven minutes to invent. Teams that look like they've got it
handled — the pipeline sorted, the aesthetic locked, everyone photogenic and calm. And there I am with a half-working build, a to-do list I've rewritten four times, and a fairly persistent suspicion that we're just kids playing studio.
The rational part of my brain knows exactly what's happening. I'm comparing our Tuesday afternoon to their launch trailer. Nobody posts the bit where the thing crashed for three days for reasons nobody understood. Nobody clips the meeting where two people realised they'd been building slightly different projects. I
know this. I've written diary entries about exactly this kind of mess, on purpose, because I think the honest version is more useful than the shiny one.
And yet. Knowing it doesn't stop the feeling. The feeling arrives anyway, sits down, makes itself comfortable.
What actually helped was something a friend at another studio said, offhand, when I admitted I felt behind. She laughed and said her team feels behind too. Then she named a studio
I had been envying, and said they'd told her the same thing last month. It's turtles all the way down. Everyone's quietly convinced everyone else has the answer, and nobody's got the answer, and we're all just doing our best with a build that mostly works.
The bit I'm still chewing on is that comparison isn't purely poison. Sometimes seeing someone else's work does light a fire — you see a bar raised and you want to reach it. That's fine. That's useful. The rot sets in when it stops being "I want to make something that good" and turns into "I am not the kind of person who makes things that good." First one's fuel. Second one's just a slow leak.
So: fewer feeds, or at least fewer feeds on the days when the build's being difficult and I'm short on sleep. Turns out my capacity to enjoy other people's brilliance is directly proportional to how my own week is going, which is not flattering but is at least predictable.
We're not behind. We're just early, and early looks like a mess from the inside. Everyone's does.
Back to the half-working build. It's ours, at least.
— Thiago & the Pixel Sprout team
Posted by Thiago Moreira · July 16, 2026
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