In any craft, there are key skills you must develop to be considered proficient. One of those skills that has eluded me is finding the most effective compromise between promise and delivery.

With Commerce Unread, I wanted to release it unannounced - ie: no promotional blog posts, no preliminary screenshots, etc. …but after working on the game for several weeks, I wanted to show some folks that I hadn’t been spending my days fruitlessly. Then, August went by.

I’m still chewing on this damn project. Video game releases have the characteristic of being “pushed back” unpredictably, and now I understand why: It’s simply a symptom of code and concept blossoming in complexity.

There’s so much nuance to these things that, as a developer, you’re almost obligated to rely on convention to accomplish anything in a reasonable time frame. …and convention is deceptively alluring - it’s often something you have to resist in order to accomplish something substantial. As a result, once again, you have time vs quality.

Eventually, I’d like to grow into the kind of guy who exercises a great deal of restraint in the promise stage of creative work. For example - There’s a lot to admire about Chef Richard Blais of Trail-Blais in Kennesaw, Georgia, but perhaps it’s most relevant to examine his characteristic of under-promising and over-delivering.

Here’s what he does: He continually uses deceptive understatement in his work as a reliable device for creating mystery, and ultimately, scope.

In his menus, the descriptions of his dishes are completely simplified, his dishes are clean and strictly minimal. The mastery, you see, is extracted from view. You’re left to wonder, and the work (in combination with the mystery) evokes something greater than you could possibly have anticipated.

Boom bang. It’s foolproof, assuming you’re not the type of fool who caves to panic or insecurity in the face of glaring silence. …which I am.

See Also:
Example Blais Menu
- From the Amateur Gourmet. Review by Adam Roberts

Commerce Unread’s Empty Promotion Page
- Here, on this site.

“Creative Restraint and Responsibility”
- An Essay by Mark Tribe Christopher Reiger.