Making a video game is a complex and time-consuming process that requires a lot of work, creativity, and dedication. Despite our best efforts, it's common for game development projects to run over schedule.
As many of you guys wrote us, the first quarter of 2023 is almost over. Where is the game?
One of the most common reasons game development projects go off track is scope creep. This refers to the gradual expansion of the project's goals and requirements, increasing workload and development time. Sometimes, new ideas or features are added to the game that was not originally planned, or existing features are expanded upon. While this can lead to a better game overall, it can also cause delays and make it difficult to reach the finish line.
That is one of our problems, but the most significant problem is planning or even planning with people. A human being frequently wants free time, vacations, or getting sick. Something that needed to be clarified for me when planning all the features and creating a schedule.
Now the game is in the phase where all the art is almost done, and the rule 80/20 is now present. What does it mean? That 80 percent of work requires the same amount of time to complete the rest of the 20 percent of the task/game. To be more specific, we started building the Colonize from scratch. We are now in the phase of putting everything together but adding all the ideas, the stuff that worked, and getting rid of the stuff that didn't work in Colonize Prologue.
My idea was simply to show the programmers, ok, here is the game. Make it the same but better, add a save feature, localizations, make the roads, etc. Well, they showed me I was wrong.
But don't worry; we changed the release date to TBA, something we should did in the first place. It does not mean it will take a year or two to make it available, or even the Colonize will be abandoned. Not at all!
It means we don't want to stress our team and mislead our players.
Best to you all,
- sanchez