A brief history of Online Terra Mystica

His wrap-up is gold:

"I find it interesting that it really did basically take a year of real time (and maybe 2 months of hacking time) before the implementation was in a shape where I would've thought about publishing it. And there's no way I'd put that amount of time into a project like this up front. Usually these projects are active for a couple of weekends before getting abandoned; fun parts are done but all the hard work of making it really usable remains."

"In this case people were eager to use even the incredibly crude early versions, so I got over that hump very quickly. And at that point every incremental improvement to the site was affecting tens, hundreds, or thousands of people. This is of course always more motivating than working on polishing the perfect piece of software that nobody is using."

"There were many architectural and design decisions done along the way that I ended up deeply regretting, and which cost me lots of time later on. But without all those early shortcuts there would've been no implementation at all. Easily the best example of Worse is Better that I've been personally involved with."

How it looks: http://terra.snellman.net/game/4pLeague_S3_D3L3_G6/max-row=3...

The Terra Mystica board game: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/120677/terra-mystica

On github: https://github.com/jsnell/terra-mystica/