Josh Sawyer says that too short a development time is bad for game developers, and essentially bad for the games themselves…

Game development is not easy, and sometimes developers end up working on their games longer than the original timeframe. There’s almost always a risk of procrastination in the creative process, and Josh Sawyer, who worked on Fallout: New Vegas as well as Pillars of Eternity and Pentiment, wrote about this on Twitter. He struck a very critical tone!

Assuming that the goal of the publisher is *not* to make shovelware, i.e. they are not trying to just get *anything* out the door regardless of quality, there are a few clear indicators that a game is not going to ship at a stated date. https://t.co/qVimo8lYhG

— Josh Sawyer (@jesawyer) July 26, 2024

“Assuming the publisher’s goal is *not* to make shovelware, i.e. they are not just trying to get *anything* out the door regardless of quality, there are some clear indicators that a game will not ship on a given date. Does each new prediction have the same level of accuracy, or is there a drop-off as you eliminate more and more possible dates and get closer to predicting the actual completion date? The biggest one is that the data shows that the content completion trajectory is so far past the date that even cutting the remaining content requires more work than the time available. Cutting content saves development time, but there is a cost to cutting. It’s not “free.

Another indicator is that content is being developed while primary gameplay features are still being brought to MVP (minimum viable product). If you don’t know how the gameplay works, you can’t design your content for it, so the content will end up being reworked or cut. If a gameplay feature is at MVP, it’s much easier to revise content as the feature is revised. If the feature simply doesn’t exist in the game, this is obviously not possible. This doesn’t apply to add-on features, which is why they should come later. Similar to features, if a content pipeline (creatures, conversations, etc.) is not fully set up end-to-end, predicting when all the content going through that pipeline will be finished is guesswork. These are all signs of a game without a reliable ship date.

When I’m asked my opinion on when a game will ship, and the game has a) predictable and reliable content creation b) all major gameplay features at MVP c) all pipelines up and running – the question becomes more about what quality I think it will ship at a given date. What’s infuriating about stupid exec and production dates is that anyone with a decent amount of experience knows that if a, b, and c aren’t there, you can’t reliably predict an end point, but you’ll try to do so with confidence and juggle schedules to make it happen. All this does is burn out and demoralize developers and (justifiably) undermine confidence in management,” Sawyer wrote.

In other words, ignorant management more often than not just causes trouble!

Source: PCGamer