Team Barton has a ritual every Sunday morning where the kids let the grown-ups sleep in a bit and the family is rewarded with pancakes afterwards.

(And yes, we allow - no, encourage - the children to spend these mornings watching TV. Don’t approve? Get bent.)

Anyway, the pancakes: They taste great, and they’re served with Canadian maple syrup – but other than that they’re just regular pancakes with no extra ingredients, sides, or frills*.

Now there’s always a lot of talk of Disney Epic Mickey around our house, and lately there’s been even more than usual, so my wife decided to put a little bit of that Disney magic into my breakfast. **Introducing Disney Epic Pancakes:

I have to admit, I really was touched by the gesture, and the kids got a huge laugh out of it too. I’m also struck by the pure simplicity of it. Just two additional globs of pancake mix and there you have it!

And because I just have to over-analyze everything I couldn’t help but think of a way to tie this into some kind of career advice or something.

So here’s my tortured motivation for the day: We game developers do an exceptional job at conjuring ideas, features, and tasks that - although potentially cool - eat up a lot of time and money, increase project complexity, and introduce tremendous risk towards our goal of shipping great video game software. Let’s try harder to identify some absolutely kickass items that take virtually no effort to achieve instead.