We sat down to update the plan this week, and pulling up the old one was a bit like reading a diary from a more innocent person. Look at them. Look at how sure they were. "Two weeks," it said, next to a thing that took six.
I don't think we're bad at this, exactly. I think everyone is bad at this, and small studios just get to be bad at it with fewer people to absorb the damage. There's a well-documented human thing where you estimate how long a job will take by imagining it going perfectly — no dead ends, no sick days, no discovering halfway through that the real problem was hiding behind the fake one. And it never, ever goes perfectly. So every plan is quietly built on a version of events that has never once happened in the history of making things.
What gets me is that we
know this now. We've been burned enough times. And we still do it. We'll estimate a task, then someone will say "add a bit for reality," and we'll pad it — and then blow through the padded number too. The padding was also optimistic. It's optimism all the way down.
The thing nobody warns you about is how much the planning itself matters when you're this small. A big studio has slack — if a task slips, there's give elsewhere in the system. We don't have give. Our timeline is directly wired to our runway, and the runway doesn't negotiate. So a plan that's wrong isn't just annoying; it's the thing standing between us and running out of road at the wrong moment. That raises the stakes on getting honest about numbers we're constitutionally incapable of getting honest about.
So we've stopped trying to predict the future and started trying to survive it. Fewer promises about specific dates. More building in the assumption that things will go sideways, because they will — we just don't know which things yet. We plan in ranges now, not points. "Somewhere between here and here" is less satisfying than a confident single date, and it has the enormous advantage of occasionally being true.
The new plan is up. It's more honest than the last one, which means it looks slower, which stung to write.
I give it three weeks before reality makes a liar of it too. But a smaller liar, hopefully.
— Thiago & the Pixel Sprout team
Posted by Thiago Moreira · July 28, 2026
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