How to Write Good Commit Messages

Good commit messages—clearly describing what changed and why—turn your project history into a useful, navigable record that you and your team rely on to understand past changes. Writing messages that concisely explain the what and especially the why is a small habit with a large payoff, because the project history is only as useful as its commit messages.

Explain the what and especially the why

A good commit message describes what changed and why, with the why being especially valuable. The what—a clear description of the change—lets someone scanning the history understand what each commit did, which is the basic function of commit messages, making the history navigable. The why—the reason for the change—is even more valuable, because while the diff shows what changed (the code itself), it doesn't show why, and the why (the reason, the problem being solved, the motivation) is often what someone reading the history later most needs to understand. A commit message that explains why the change was made—the bug it fixed, the feature it implemented, the reason behind it—captures the context that the diff alone can't convey, which is invaluable for understanding past changes. This is the key to good commit messages: explaining not just the what (which the diff partly shows) but the why (which the diff can't show), so the history captures the reasoning behind changes. Concision matters too—a good commit message is clear and concise, conveying the what and why efficiently without rambling—so the history is scannable and the messages are quick to read. Explaining the what and especially the why, concisely, is the foundation of good commit messages, because it captures the change and its reasoning in a clear, scannable form that makes the history useful.

A useful history is what good commit messages create, which you and your team rely on. The payoff of good commit messages is a useful project history that you and your team rely on to understand past changes. The project history—the record of commits—is a valuable resource for understanding how the code got to its current state, why changes were made, and what happened over the project's development, but it's only useful if the commit messages are good. A history of good commit messages (clear what, explained why, concise) is navigable and informative—you can scan it to understand the project's evolution, find when and why a change was made, and recover the context behind the code—while a history of poor commit messages (vague, missing the why, unclear) is nearly useless, providing little understanding of the past changes. This useful history matters because you and your team rely on it: future you, trying to understand a past change or recover why something was done, relies on the commit messages; teammates trying to understand the project's history rely on them; and the history is a key tool for navigating and understanding the codebase's evolution. The small habit of writing good commit messages—explaining the what and why concisely—creates this useful history, which pays off every time you or a teammate needs to understand a past change, find when something was done, or recover the reasoning behind the code. Combining explaining the what and especially the why (capturing the change and its reasoning) concisely with creating a useful history (that you and your team rely on) is what makes good commit messages the valuable habit they are—turning the project history into a navigable, informative record that captures the changes and their reasoning, which you and your team rely on to understand the past. Writing good commit messages, by clearly describing what changed and why, concisely, is a small habit with a large payoff, because it creates the useful project history that is an essential resource for understanding past changes, which future you and your team will rely on. The history is only as useful as its commit messages, so writing good ones—explaining the what and especially the why, concisely—is what makes the project history the valuable, navigable record it should be, rather than the useless log of vague messages that poor commit habits produce.

Let real players be the judge

It's remarkable how differently real players behave from how you imagine they will. The tutorial you think is obvious confuses them; the feature you agonised over goes unnoticed; the thing you almost cut becomes their favourite. None of that is visible from inside your own head, which is why watching real people play is the single highest-leverage thing most developers under-do.

Watch without intervening, resist the urge to explain, and pay attention to what players do as much as what they say. Their confusion and their choices are data, and acting on that data is what turns a game that works for you into one that works for everyone.

Polish where players actually look

Polish is not evenly valuable. Players form an impression in the first minutes and spend most of their time in the core loop, so effort spent there returns far more than effort spread thin across content few people reach. The opening, the moment-to-moment feel, and the things every player touches are where polish converts directly into how good the game feels.

Be deliberate about it. Make the first impression strong and the core interactions satisfying before widening out, because a great core with less content almost always beats a sprawling game that never feels good to play.

Scope is a decision, not an accident

Almost every overscoped game got that way one reasonable addition at a time, with no single decision ever feeling like the mistake. The finish line recedes a little with each new feature, and because the project always feels nearly done, the developer rarely notices how far the goal has drifted until they're exhausted and the game still isn't out.

Treat scope as something you actively decide rather than something that happens to you. Write down what the finished game contains, make every addition a conscious trade against that, and keep most new ideas in a backlog where they belong — because a small game you finish beats a large one you abandon.

Measure before you optimise

Intuition about what's slow, what's confusing, or what's driving players away is usually wrong, and acting on it wastes effort on problems that don't matter while the real ones persist. The developers who improve their games efficiently are the ones who measure first — profiling performance, watching real sessions, capturing actual errors — and let the data set their priorities.

It's slower than trusting your gut, but it's the only approach that reliably improves the game instead of just changing it. Find the biggest real problem, fix that, and measure again, rather than optimising guesses.

The first impression is most of the battle

More players leave in the opening minutes than at any other point, which makes the first few minutes the highest-leverage stretch of the whole game — and also the part the developer can least see clearly, having played it a thousand times. What feels obvious to you is often confusing to someone seeing it fresh, and that gap quietly costs you players before they ever reach the good part.

Get the player into the interesting part fast, let them feel competent quickly, and watch first-time players go through the opening without helping them. Nobody quits a game they're enjoying, so making the early minutes land is most of the battle for retention.

Good commit messages clearly describe what changed and especially why, concisely—turning your project history into a useful, navigable record. Future you and your team rely on the history to understand past changes, so capture the reasoning, not just the diff.