With your idea refined through prototype process, the real deal starts. Production is the slowest part for Cloud. Jobs, classes, finals, we got enough distractions to fail the milestones. Cloud started on Jan 2005. By the end of the first semester, All we have are a couple islands and clouds represented by dots. And everybody's pretty much burned out.
As scary as it may sounds, deadline is your only friend when you are stuck and melting in the endless production. After maknig so many games, it is fairly obvious that a deadline will benefit people with goal, hope, moral, and surprises. Although it was half a year before IGF deadline, we came up with our own deadline in the summer and crunched 3 weeks to push Cloud to alpha. By then, the idea wasn't fresh any more, people are losing interests, we called break......
But one golden rule you have to remember: "If you can't finish making a game, it's worse than not making it." No matter how far it is from your original vision, you will always be extremly rewarded when the game is done. And believe me, amazing surprises always happen in the last several days. |
