During my tenure at Filament Games, I've worked on projects that have required multiple months of development to complete. LawCraft, however, was unique in that it had a tiny scope.
Actually, at the time, LawCraft was the smallest complete game Filament had yet to attempt. Your automatic assumption might be that smaller games are easier to develop, but in fact the lack of development cycles puts the team at a disadvantage. Development must be constant and furious in order to get a game out the door in three weeks, and more of the game's inevitable problems must be identified and fixed per iteration.
They say hindsight is 20/20, and they're right. We're reminded of this with every game we create. Even though game design documents and storyboards constantly guide our development, it's inevitable that we identify new ways to improve each game as we progress. It's possible to create the game we originally wanted in a given timeframe, but it's impossible to make the game we want now by the end of development. This poses a real problem to us as educational game developers: our goal of making the best possible game isn't always attainable in the time available. We find ourselves chomping at the bit for additional days so we can implement our latest ideas and make the game ever greater.
Development must end at some point, though, since we want our games to be played, and we want to move on to new and exciting projects. So what do we do? I think a great start would be to preemptively plan to make each game better than think we're going to want it to be. That is, if we've accurately guesstimated that a project will take us four weeks to develop, we're better off making it six weeks. When development kicks off, those last two weeks are intentionally left entirely open. Then, with each iteration we complete, we add very real hours of additional work and fixes. Worst case, we finish early and simply don't need the extra iterations. More likely, though, my team is guaranteed additional time for polish outside the scope of the original project; and time is without a doubt the most precious resource.
