> The blog post alone makes you want to purchase whatever this person has been working on based on how much passion is oozing off the explanation of how it's made.

Papers Please is nice, but Return of the Obra Dinn is a masterpiece. Honestly. A very cool concept with some impressive attention to detail. Pixel-perfect 1-bit dithered graphics, amazing soundtrack, and a nice story. I don’t have a link here but there was a forum thread somewhere where he discussed his progress as he was making the game. It’s a bit long but we’ll worth a read as well.

I consider both games to be masterpieces, keeping my attention even when I was bored with gaming in general.

I also played Helsing's Fire on the iPad, which while not a masterpiece, is still pretty fun!

I like the idea of Papers, Please more than actually playing it, I think. But I never played Helsing’s Fire, thanks for the suggestion!

This may be true, but in the same way that paintings don't have to be "beautiful" to be good paintings, games don't always have to be fun experiences to be good games. I think Papers Please is a perfect example of such a game. I didn't enjoy it so much as that it engaged me in its bleak bureaucracy.

Good point!

Though I actually enjoyed "Papers, Please" gameplay. I was overjoyed when I found it has an endless mode. I enjoy stamping those red "denied"!

The default mode of Obra Dinn actually is not using true 1 bit graphics. It is downsampled double resolution rendering, with additional softening added. It is very subtle about it, and I only noticed on my second play-though when I noticed the book contents seemed to have very slightly different color than the rest of the game.

One can force true one bit graphics ("digital mode"), but the downside is greater flicker in the dithering dots when moving.

IMO you should absolutely buy what he produces, partly as you say to support a genuine craftsman, but also because (unsurprisingly) the games he produces are really good. I also think of my purchases as a donation to keep his blog posts coming.

No, this is definitely high-quality. Like the person you're responding to, far higher quality than a lot of professional work I've seen. This is very clearly someone who cares about the end result, not just about getting it done, and a lot of work I've seen in my career, the person cares more about just getting it done, than they do about getting it done right.

I'd also say it's about having the skill to do this: as other posters note, there are multiple competencies on display in that post; graphics, coding, testing, etc. Each of those takes time to hone. I've worked with any number of people that are not honing their skills, because when they get stuck or hit problems, will not take the time to dig into them and really understand exactly what problem they hit, why they hit it, and how whatever language/tool/system they're working with works. They'll guess until something appears to work, and then move on.

I'd put the detail in this blog post up there with Friday Factorio Facts, and that is also another top-notch game.

If your professional environment is just full of people working at or even above the level here, you should know you have it good. And I think they do exist: I've definitely joined places where there are just lots of incredible people; in hindsight I wish I'd done a better job of learning and listening, when I had that…

I believe it all boils down to being an artist working on a project you're passionate about. If I was forced to work on someone else's project that I don't really care about just to make a living, I'd probably simply execute my tasks to make sure I reach the expectations, and that's it. I'd strive to finish my tasks fast to have more time doing something I actually care about, be it a side project, hobby, family time or even just a walk in a park. However, when I'm a one-man orchestra doing a project where my main motivation is to see that project being done, it's actually getting hard to restrain myself from going into all those interesting rabbit holes that could easily postpone the completion of that project almost indefinitely. I find it hard not to hone my skills and dig into stuff to understand it in that setting.

(of course, when I was young it was easy for me to get passionate not about the project itself, but on mere technical aspects of work I was doing for someone else; this kind of motivation, however, doesn't last very long unless you're able to change your job often to keep it fresh and challenging)

What I deeply regret is that I struggle with writing about stuff I'm doing. There's a lot of interesting knowledge one acquires from such projects, but it often gets almost lost and only really lives on as a vague "experience" you can indirectly apply to your future projects. I would like to have my own experiences written down in such a neat way like in this post, not just for publicity, but also for my own personal needs when I want to go back to something I've done years ago. Usually, my attempts end with an unfinished, incomplete document that gets so out of date before completion that it's best to throw it out and start over, which of course doesn't happen until the memory of what I've done becomes foggy enough to make reminding myself what to write about a challenge on its own :( As it is right now, I'd struggle to describe the vast majority of my past passion work if anyone asked me about it; I'd need plenty of time and some "detective work" to reconstruct my memories.

Your whole wall of text is in response to a fantasy strawman position I have in no way expressed