You know the phrase "It's done when it's done." ? It is used by WoW-Mogul Blizzard e.g. and it means, that you should never release a game if you don't feel, that it is really finished. Forget this. It's a lie. The phrase should state "It's never done, but at some point you just have to stop!".
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
