Working on and with the Lazarus tools was an eye-opening experience for me. Not being completely familiar with the games industry, I hadn't fully grasped the amount of infrastructure that a game requires. When I think "creating software" I think "sitting down at your development environment, writing code, and screaming at the compiler when it gives you obscure error messages". Games, however, are a different beast altogether, combining visual arts, world-building, sounds, literature, software code, and more in such a way as to absolutely necessitate intermediate tools to aid in fitting the pieces together. In my experience, working on the tools has been nearly as rewarding as working on the end-user portions of the game; in the end, it's about making my colleagues' lives easier, and that always gives me a warm fuzzy.