The art of throwing away

One of the things that occur frequently while developing a game is the need to throw away work that has already been done. This can be due to production plans, testing results, incoming feedback, etc. and sometimes things simply doesn’t work out as imagined. Despite trying you can’t plan everything in advance since it is a highly agile development field and many things can change while walking forward.

Well, that’s easy to say, but it leads to problems regularly. Here are some reasons why.

Throwing away needs to be learned.

Making the decision what needs to go isn’t really obvious. You need to weight up the chances that something will work if you just spend enough time in it and the fact that you have limited time and resources.

Sometimes a feature does not fit into the game any longer even if you loved it in the first place and unfortunately still do. As most of the team members give their heart into the development of the games production, this can effect every single piece of work.

Also project planing can be a source for hard decisions. It can happen that parts of a feature are already finished, but other departments can not manage to complete it within production time because things can go wrong and may take way longer than you initially thought.

Depending on the size of a feature it can even be a question of money (and time) spent, that serves as an argument in keeping everything as it is.

Enough theory, what did we throw away?

Early in development we were looking for opportunities to separate Net.Attack() from similar games and came up with the idea to let the enemies behave like a fluid instead of individual entities. A couple of weeks we tried to figure out how attacks work, what it looks like and how it behaves but in the end we couldn’t solve the problems satisfactorily and finally buried that chapter, before loosing too much valuable time.

Another one that didn’t make it into the game was the already designed and implemented user interface window for in game purchasable permanent upgrades.

This was part of the first progression system but was abandoned because of upcoming balancing issues and player feedback. It was designed to represent a black market online shop with ratings and fake user comments which perfectly fitted into the theme. You notice, I loved it…

It takes time.

Those are just two examples and there was so much more to tell. It is always a struggle of prioritization and objectivity. Fortunately, it gets better and easier with experience but honestly for me personal it can still make me feel furious or sad.

Nevertheless, it has to be done and for me making the best of what you have available is still one of the most interesting things in game production.