You're Going to Have to Go Back

It seems so obvious when you're standing there, at the top of the mountain, your project completed, that you spent the greatest amount of design, rework, and polish time on the first 10 to 20% of your game.


The thing is, it's not obvious.  When you're in the throes of production, you finish a level, an area, a world, or whatever your unit of gameplay space is, and move on as fast as possible to the next.  Regardless of where you’re at in the production cycle, the status of your tools, your team, and your deadlines you do as much polish as you can afford.


Even with this, we all have this idealized “polish time” allocated for the end of the project.  For the precious few projects that actually get to use polish time for actual polish, it’s often wasted because the polish time is either ill-defined or poorly allocated.


Focus on the First
In reality, you need to allocate and plan to spend a significant amount of your polish time (however much or little you have) on the first 10 to 20% of your game.  There's a couple of reasons for this. 


1:  This is the most important part of the game for your Players.  This is where you hook them or lose them.  Yes. Yes. Yes. You need to have a solid product from start to finish, you need to have good pacing, you need tight control, you need an intuitive UI. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.  All true. All will be covered later, but like any medium we only have a small window to really sink our talons into our audience, so that first 10 to 20% is crucial.


2:  Assuming you're producing your levels/areas/worlds/etc. in some semblance of the chronological order in which they appear in the game, your first 10 to 20% is going to be... Well... Terrible.  That first 10 to 20% is where your design and art departments were thrashing -- trying to find and settle in on what and how to build.  All the concept art, design docs, and prototypes in the world simple won't cover the issue. 


When you transition from preproduction to production, there's going to be thrash.  Thrash is inevitable, and it's important.  It's in that thrash period that the skeleton of your game takes shape.  It's in that period that your game (not as defined in your dreams, your docs, your art, your hopes, your pitch, or anything) that what your game actually is develops.  What you'll find is that as production continues, this definition narrows, and everyone has a much clearer understanding what it really truly being built.  Unfortunately, this clarity is lacking at the beginning, and when you get to the end you'll find that starting point just doesn't really fit with the rest of game.


The Solution
Embrace reality.  If you're going to have polish time (and lucky you if you are) be sure you go into it understanding that you're going to burning most of it on a very small part of your game.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  It's not perfect, but nothing in our industry is.  If you go into your polish time, fully embracing the fact that you're not just gonna "touch up" those early spots, but you're gonna have to go back and do heavy lifting, real actual "work" and that work is gonna take time, you'll be in a much better position to know how to what to spend the left over polish time on.