Technical Debt is a handy metaphor that has been used in the programming community for awhile now. I sort of think it’s one of those things that probably got coined by somebody in the Lean Startup community, or the Agile community, or something like that. The idea of the metaphor is simple: you incur technical debt at the start of a project for a variety of reasons – getting your software started or out the door, for instance; or meeting a release target. At some point, however, the debt collector comes calling. This week, I seem to be paying my debts off: in the case of Clockwork Empires, we incurred a lot of technical debt getting the game into Early Access, with the knowledge that at some point during the process we would have to pay it off in order to get out of Early Access. Well, the point of paying it off seems to be this week.
