We had some excellent meetings with the leadership on our art team today -- making sure we were still all on the same page about the artistic vision of the game and talking proactively about how to keep team involvement high while keeping the individual artists having a sense of ownership.  The last thing we want is design by committee, and in such a communication-heavy envrionment as Ensemble it is easy to let things slide in that direction.  Overall it was a great discussion, and I'm reminded how incredible it is to have a creative team that is really capable of not just amazing art generation, but also pursuing very high level vision and organizational goals.

While game development from a programmer's point of view is largely a technical challenge, at the end of the day we often live or die by our creative choices.  When we're in the middle of refactoring a large class hierarchy or sorting through a tricky shader problem it can be easy to lose sight of that.