How To Finish Long Game Projects!

hey as you might know there are only three big things that can stop you from making a successful game in my opinion three big filters I've talked about those in this video that I'm going to link right there the first big filter is finishing your game if you don't finish your game then you're not going to make a successful game as easy as that and I think I have found a new way to pass that filter to finish my games more easily from now on especially for longer project and if you have struggled with finishing longer projects in the past then I think you will appreciate this what if you just finish your game every 3 months yeah I think finishing the full scope of willu nail will take about one or two years but why don't I just finish the game in 3 months it would probably be pretty short it would be lacking a lot of features that I ideally would like to have but at the very least I would have a releasable version of the game and after that I can still expend it another 3 months and after that I can still go another 3 months so what I'm suggesting is finishing your game multiple times with different Scopes the

way I imagine this would work is by selecting a part of your game that could resemble a finished product and then just finishing that first that should still allow you to keep expanding your game later on but the risk of not being able to finish it should be highly reduced the underlying idea being that you keep your game as close as possible to a finished product at any time my initial plan for will you snail was to create at least a 5H hour experience but hey let's scrab that let's do a 1-hour experience instead but it will still have all of the important features a final game needs a tutorial a boss fight it will even tell a story so it will basically be a finished game after that I can re-evaluate and if I want I just expand the scope and go another round in the case of will you snail that would mean adding more content more levels and More Story details and I'm thinking are there any downsides to this I mean okay maybe it's making me a little more inefficient maybe maybe it's a little a little more stressful I don't know but yeah I mean the stress is probably even enough side it puts that stress on to

get something done in those 3 months to actually finish your game in a way that you're actually that you would be happy with releasing it you don't have to release it after 3 months but you could something that's 2 years away feels like something that's super far away and something you don't even have to worry about you still have a lot of time so no need to get super productive right whereas 3 months you better get going if you want to reach that deadline feels way closer it feels way more immediate you might be familiar with Parkinson's law work expens so as to fill the time available for its completion so basically the more time you give a task the longer it will take the game play you see right here is from the will you nail winter demo which I finished within just 2 weeks which was way faster than I expected and I think the reason why I could finish it so quickly was because I just had two weeks there was no more time I had to finish it before Christmas so I guess one more reason to give yourself less time than you would like to have it's probably a good idea to plan this all out so here I made a little plan for the next 3 months and and I think it's cool to have like one

main task you want to accomplish every single day these Milestones are the first things I placed obviously and then I've got to just got to fill in the stuff in between so definitely always include a bit of buffer time because things are almost always going to take a bit longer than you think and also play testing and buck fixing is important as well and then here is where I'll decide what to do next here I'll have a finished game a finished version of will you snail and then I'll decide will I keep it at that or will I keep extending the game even further so you have these awesome re-evaluation points and you also have a finished game which means you can let a lot of people play test it that should make it very easy to decide whether you want to continue working on it and if yes what exactly it needs to become a better game you obviously also don't need to do three months you can also do one month whatever just finish your game multiple times if you want to make a game in two weeks for example then you might want to split it into one week and one week so you finish the entire game in one week and then you finish it again in the second week with even more cont and making it even better

so I've already started with this schedule more or less I already completed the first task and I think it feels great to work towards something like that building a big game is like building a skyscraper there are two ways to build a skyscraper the first one is storage by storage from the bottom to the top which I would argue is the reasonable choice to make or you build the building from the left to the right all storages at once which unfortunately is what I've been doing in the past and what a lot of other game developers seem to to be doing as well the problem with this approach is that if you have to abandon the project or you decide to quit during development you're left off with an unfinished building and nobody's ever going to live in that if you had invested the same amount of energy into building a skyscraper storage by storage you would have a finished building by now even if you quit halfway through the building process people should still be able to move in and I want to start building my games like this and stop building them like this I mean for some games that might actually not work maybe

for some games this is not possible where the development Cycles are too long where there are a lot of complicated steps you have to go through where you first have to set up your engine your net code or whatever but for a simple game like will sell I feel like there's absolutely nothing speaking against that method just finished the game in 3 months so I'll finish will nail at the end of March basically I'll have a finished game and after that I can decide do I want to release it or do I want to keep going and likely I keep going but at the least I'll have a backup if I want to quit then hey at the least I've got a finished game so I think that's something that can definitely help you to get past that first filter getting past that finishing it can certainly be painful to turn your great ambitious project into something way way smaller to do what basically feels like crippling your main vision of the game so keep in mind that you're not giving up on your vision you're just approaching it step by step just for the time being it means you have to eat the bullet and you might even even have to

cut a couple of your favorite features from the game um I see only upsides and no downsides for example it'll be easier to tell if the game's actually good you can test if it's running on all machines it motivates you to release something it pushes you to your limits it uh gives you something to work towards it makes sure you'll finish your game more easily and all of that comes at the cost of maybe a couple of percentages of efficiency I think the trade is absolutely worth it for simple games like will you snail if you're making a simple 2D game or anything like said finish your game in the next 3 months and then you can still add another 3 months and another three and another three if you feel like it but at the very least set that goal to have a releasable game after three months shorter development Cycles hell yeah I love it I love that idea I'm definitely going to try that for will you snail um maybe consider trying that as well or let me know what you think about that idea I think it's a good one