In my first article, I stated that funding and money were the greatest difficulties in game development. However, upon publication, I received comments suggesting that many games had managed to break through this barrier. To my ignorance, I realized there is a vast library of games made by talented individuals who possess the ability to handle every aspect of development themselves. One comment on Facebook brought up excellent
point, arguing that time constraints are actually the largest issue in game development.
I have to agree with this opinion. For many small indie games, where game creation is considered a "pastime," it can be incredibly challenging to find a balance between everyday life and a passion project. Just like money, our initial time estimates are often wishful thinking at best. Combined with overambition, it’s easy for game development to eclipse other parts of our lives. I, too, struggled with this issue while working on Tales of Grimace. Initially, I planned for the game to have a one-year development cycle, but the prospect of adding new plot elements or game mechanics became too exciting to ignore. While I kept telling myself these were meaningful additions,
the development cycle soon ballooned into a bloated two-year period.
Another often-ignored fact is that you will always encounter issues. It seems that game development strictly operates under Murphy’s Law: every possible issue becomes a giant pain in the process.
In my opinion, however, the most time-consuming part of game development is the polishing stage. No matter how good you think your game is, there’s always a way to improve it. It’s easy to get lost in this never-ending void, spending an eternity meticulously tweaking every small aspect. Furthermore, as a result of the long development cycle, your skills will improve, and the later sections of your project will often feel leagues ahead of the earlier ones. This disparity can easily tempt you to remake earlier sections, creating a vicious cycle.
This is why we see so many game developers with an endless backlog of unfinished projects or one project they’ve been working on their entire lives.
So, the question I’m asking is: When do we draw the line in game development?When has there been enough polishing? When do we simply accept the quality of the game and release it?
Perhaps it’s better to finish a project we feel is subpar, accept that it reflects our abilities at the time, and set our sights on a new project—migrating our ideas and polish to that one. I encourage you all to think about this dilemma and draw your own conclusions.
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