Skipping the IGF
October 14th, 2009 by Macguffin
It’s been an interesting day.
We’re going to skip entering the IGF this year. In short, the game just isn’t ready. Even with all the ass we’ve been busting, we’re juuuust now about at a first-playable state. Going through our to-do items left for the 11/1 deadline, there are just about as many high-level tasks left to do as there are days left in the month.
We could submit no matter what, and then update the build over the next few weeks after that. The downsides there are that it would be a poor initial submission that doesn’t technically meet the rules of the competition (you’re supposed to be feature-complete), and that I’d pretty much kill myself for the next 5 weeks getting a build I could live with. After talking with Graham, we decided that the best course of action is to keep focused on bringing the game along as best we can, as fast as we can – but without crunching like crazy to come up with what we would consider a substandard entry.
I’m pretty disappointed, frankly, that we’re not going to be able to make this work… but as all good project managers know, it’s not about what you get in a perfect world – it’s about the choices in front of you. And I still feel our longer term deadlines are realistic.
Tomorrow Graham and I sit down and do a soup-to-nuts review of the game. Our goal is going to be to set a deadline (probably 12/1) where we can have a fully playable alpha to pass around in the Boston dev community and get some feedback. I feel really confident that we can make that kind of schedule work – but we’re going to put in some good planning and analysis to make sure.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly psyched about everything that has been getting done on the game to date. We’ve come a terrific distance in less than 11 months – especially considering this is Graham’s first video game project, and the first that I’ve programmed or designed. I think our issue with the IGF deadline was in my not realizing we were biting off more than we could chew. As my good friend Patrick said to me today, “Think of all the ways you could have f***** this up, and didn’t!”
He’s got a great point.
So, yeahhhhh. Interesting day. It’s weird to have the excitement I’m feeling with how fast the game is coming along but head-to-head with the frustration of missing a deadline. I mentioned to Graham as I was dwelling on the whole thing today – I realized I had never missed a deadline in 8 years of making games. Every milestone I ever was associated with, every game, shipped on time. I’m not sure I was prepared to actually fail at getting the game into the IGF – I don’t think I’d ever really considered the possibility.
But, that’s fine. A good bit of the reason I wanted to go indie and start my own company was to learn about doing this all from top to bottom. And you can’t learn very well without failing a couple times here and there. So, learn we will.
And this game is still going to be pretty spectacular.
Tags: annoucements, Dev Blog, heritage
