Ending game projects is always tough. On Conan we are approaching the phase where we need to hunker down and finish the game. No more new features that haven’t already been designed. Avoid feature creep at all costs. Polish what we have… etc.
It’s a point in the project where I have some serious mixed feelings. On one hand, it feels awful to turn down our designers and animators constant requests for new gameplay functionality. “Can we have a new minigame that does …”, “We’ve got a great new puzzle design that needs …”; these sorts of situations are coming fast and furious and I am the proverbial axe man. My response is pretty uniform: no, we can’t add anything new, stop asking because it’s going to hurt the quality of the game! Time spent on these new features makes us lose time on polishing what we have, an overall loss in quality of the entire product. Then we argue about it for the next 5 minutes until the proposed feature is usually shot down. It never seems to dissuade additional requests the next day though!
I feel like a jerk being the hatchet man all the time for gameplay features but on the other side of the coin with regards to the production of the game it does kind of feel good. The end is in sight. We have a goal, a list of tasks required to complete it, and hopefully the focused drive to finish all of those tasks on time. After 16 months or so in development, a sense of closure is starting to take over. Certainly a bit of fear comes with it too – “will the game be any good?” I ask myself. Any developer will tell you after looking at the same product for a long period of time it becomes somewhat difficult to know what kind of reception it will receive from your audience (could be said of all artistic pursuits, honestly).
All we can do now is crank it out. Finish the feature set and try to polish it as much as possible in the time we have. Try our best to make the most fun game possible. I can’t wait to see the end result!
Good post.