Over the last days I´ve been deeply involved into polishing our first game, to give players and sponsors a great first impression when they check it out. Minor bugs got fixed, the leveldesign got improved, we had a little discussion with our service for ingame-ads because of the amount of boobs in the game and we even included three new features.
One might think that - after we thought the game was finally done on last friday - after three additional days of work and polish the game now should be finished in every respect ... not! I still see lots of room for improvements: Leveldesign could be even better. There could be more levels. The story could be longer, involve more puns and tell more different aspects. More collectable bonuses wouldn`t hurt too. Ah, and the sound effects, those could get better, too, as well as the effects involving camera angles. The code could get optimzied as well, squeezing out a few more frames per second.
But ... no. I won't touch it from now on. I could go on like this forever. You could go on improving almost every game out there forever. It's not like with a painting, a song or a book, where at one point you think "That's what I wanted." or "Ok, that sucks, I´ll do another.". There is no "right" in art. But there`s a lot of "wrong" in games. Game development sometimes feels like science: The more questions you answer, the more new questions you get. There is ALWAYS a vast room for improvement.
And even the kings of WoW over at Blizzard can't tell me that they at one day sat down at their desks, looked at the game and thought "Yep. That's it. Done.". The huge amount of patches and the drastic improvements included in each of the released and upcoming add-ons tell a different story. Gamedesign doesn't seem to be "done when it's done". It seems that real skill is not "getting your game done", but knowing when you have to stop. If you don't your game will leave you mad, poor and lonley sitting in front of your screen in a dark room giggling. I won't touch our game anymore. It's done. Really. Maybe I will improve the leveldesign a bit. Or the mentioned camera effects. But nothing else. Really. *cough*
Important comment by ★ASU★:
The females in WoW have EPIC UGLY butts, so it's NOT done at all! ｏ(>o<)ｏ
I concur, you can always see ways to improve your game, but you may not give in to this feeling or you end like 3D Realms.
ReplyDeleteI remember a game though where this "one day you just have to stop fiddling and release it" attitude really bit the players in the butt.
"Outpost", a kind of "Sim City" in space, was developed by Sierra, and it was famous for being rubbish. In fact many features pictured on the box and in the manual were missing, many bugs plagued the game itself, and the head designer - instead of doing the honorable thing and kill himself - posted an open letter to the game community saying that he felt it was time to release the game despite its shortcomings and broken promises. Ah, the good old times. I still have that game. Now that the old, bitter memories came back I should take it out and spend the rest of the day insulting it for all the dreams it crushed by its mere existence as an appaling, half-finished mess of a game.
mach doch hier auch mal **ost in traslation** ich kann kein englisch :(((
ReplyDeleteIt has to be done!! :>
ReplyDeleteI think the best way to make money with flashgames is developing a game like FarmVille for Facebook. Where the players can buy new items with real money - then you also can concentrate on one game.
yep, sponsoring is kinda out, buyable content is the more win-bringing business our days, but that's not an omnipotent truth for all kind of games. Lets see what you've got, and we'll tell you for sure.
ReplyDeleteA flash-based kind of multi (massive) asu-worship-browsergame would be kind of fun, btw, just sayin'
greetings
Wuhh. Facebook games, buyable content ... I think I gotta talk about THIS topic in a whole blogpost ... ^^°
ReplyDelete@Klopfer: Another nice example was Hellgate:London. They released it earlier then they should have to earn enough money to go on, and ended up filing bankruptcy because the game was not polished enough when it was released. The irony. Hm. ... I think I should go back to further improving our game ... Or shouldn't I? .... *head explodes*