Why we dogfood our own tools

Unveil makes tools. Jupiter Wave is the studio that has to use them.

It makes games with our tooling, so when something is slow, confusing, or just missing, we run into it ourselves before anyone else does. Dio is the first of its games we’ve listed on this site, and more are coming.

Why bother

A tool can look great on a feature list and still wear you out after a few hours of real work. Demos don’t show that. A deadline does. If the person who wrote the tool is also the person stuck with it, the problem gets fixed quickly, and usually before it reaches you.

What changes day to day

The point of Jupiter Wave is to put our tools under that kind of pressure, from Mason and Cartograph to the Unveil Engine, which isn’t out yet. When one of them gets in the way, the fix goes back into the tool. If a workaround only helps us, we’d rather rethink the feature than keep the workaround.

This is slower than shipping early and waiting for bug reports. We think it’s worth it, because most of the rough edges are already gone by the time you see the tool.