The kids pitched it to me at the kitchen table with the seriousness of people who had clearly discussed it beforehand without me. There was a concept. There was a name. There was, alarmingly, a plan for what we would do with the money.

I said yes for the wrong reasons. I said yes because I write software for a living and I liked the idea of being useful at something in front of my own children, which is a motivation I'd recommend examining before you commit six weekends to it.

The Pitch Meeting I Was Ambushed With

I know how to build things. That is my actual job, the one that pays for the house. So on paper I was the right guy for this: somebody comes to you with a spec, you scope it, you build it, everybody's happy.

Except the spec was written by people who play these games constantly and were describing something they had experienced from the inside. They knew exactly how it should feel. They could not tell me a single thing about how it should work, and every time I asked a scoping question I got an answer about vibes.

That is not a complaint about them. It is the most accurate product conversation I have ever been part of, honestly. Users know what they want and cannot tell you how to build it, and I have sat through four hundred meetings that were the same conversation with worse snacks.

We agreed on something buildable, which is to say I quietly cut about eighty percent of it, and started on a Saturday morning with a coffee and a genuine amount of enthusiasm.

Six Weekends, Two Very Invested Collaborators

The first two weekends were the good part. Everything you build early is visible — a floor appears, a thing moves, something makes a noise it wasn't making before. My oldest turned out to have an actual eye for whether a space felt right to move through, which I did not expect and could not have faked.

Weekends three and four were where I remembered that the last twenty percent of anything takes as long as the first eighty. The stuff that separates a thing you made from a thing people will actually spend time in is invisible, tedious, and impossible to demo to a nine-year-old on a Saturday afternoon. Interest in the project became, let's say, uneven. Mine included.

We shipped on the sixth weekend. There was real ceremony to it. We sent the link to everyone we knew, which is a smaller number than you think, and sat there refreshing the player count.

It got into the single digits and stayed there. A couple of friends. Somebody's cousin. John, who does not play these games and I suspect logged in purely so the number would move.

What Six Weekends Actually Bought

In money: essentially nothing, in either direction. Nothing came in worth writing down. Nothing much went out either, because the tools are free and the only real input was time.

The time is the honest cost, and it is not small. Six Saturdays is a season. There were other things I could have done with those Saturdays, including several of the hustles on this site that would have produced actual dollars. If you evaluate this the way I evaluate everything else here — hours in, dollars out — it is the worst-performing thing I have ever done.

The part I got wrong was the part I set up at the beginning. I let the kids talk about what we'd do with the money, and I didn't correct it, because correcting it felt like being the dad who says no to things. So when nobody played it, there was a conversation I had to have that I had made unnecessarily hard for myself.

"So it didn't work," my oldest said, not devastated, just clarifying the situation. And then, about a minute later, still looking at the screen: "Can we change the middle part? The middle part is boring."

Which is, I would like to note, a better instinct about shipping software than most adults I have worked with have ever demonstrated.

The Reason It Is Still the Best Thing on This List

We did change the middle part. It is still not a good game and approximately nobody plays it, and we have gone back to it maybe five times since, usually for an hour on a night when nothing else is happening.

What stuck is that my kids watched somebody build a thing that did not work and then keep going anyway. Not as a lesson — I did not sit them down and make it a lesson, which would have ruined it. They just saw it, in the ordinary way you see what the adults around you actually do with disappointment.

I keep this one on the ledger at essentially zero, which is accurate, and I keep it near the top of the list of things I'd do again, which is also accurate. Both of those being true at once is the most honest thing on this whole site.

Nobody played our game. There is a version of me that finds that funny and a version that still checks the number every couple of months. Post the Ls too.

Note: Everyday Hustle Jeff is the written side of a digital series. These accounts are composite and dramatized. Any figures are what they were on the day, for one person, and are not a projection, a track record, or advice.