Eleven out of Thirteeen levels are fully playable. Only 2 to go right? Right?

So my list of tasks is becoming more release oriented as I target early next year. I've got to work out achievements and wrangle a steam/google play page (which I have been informed isn't a trivial activity). Got to code/fix all the little things that only I will ever notice.

What's good in all of this surprising mountain of work just to polish a game to a release state? 

Not much I guess other than to serve as a grim warning to others 90% of the work is in the last 10% of the project. It's why we crunch and then tell people we didn't.

I've worked on dozens of projects over the decades ... and I've only seen a product launch comfortably on-time twice in my life. We do the post-mortems and resolve to do better next time, but it never happens. Somehow it's midnight and 40 developers are queuing up for compensation pizza ... the worst were the times where we'd crunched for a month only to have the client cancel a multi-million dollar project three days before demonstration.

The Crunch. I avoid it on Warmonger by using my "Just one thing" rule where I literally only expect one thing out of myself every time I open gamemaker. Just one thing then I can close it and do something else. Just one thing a couple times a week. A couple weeks a month. It adds up. I don't have a deadline, I havent promised anything to anyone.

After four years I have 11/13 levels in a playable, demonstrable state.

Quite a journey I guess ... but also ... just one day at a time.