Triple the work, triple the fun!!!

In light my last post, we have come to a rather unexpected decision. It's somewhat radical. Some would understandably call it stupid. It might be totally wrong. But my gut tells me it’s the right thing to do.

We are going to develop three games at the same time.

We're not going to have three separate teams or recruit three times more people or anything like that. We're just going to have the core game development team work on three projects at once. My guess is, that *won't* mean each one takes three times longer to make. I imagine it will sort of be like writing reports for school. If you have one report to do, it takes all weekend to get it done. But if you have three to do, you still manage to get all three done. And they usually aren’t three times worse. You shift priorities and interleave work and keep three MS Word Windows open. It shouldn't work, but somehow it does.

Here are what I see as the benefits to this shift in process. Some of these specifically address what I posted last time:

-Like Abe said, we are our own best self-evaluators. We hold the vision for a game, and a game's designers are the only ones who can truly see that a game follows through on its vision. But when you're in month 8 of a 9 month project, that becomes almost impossible. You've become so used to seeing the game every single day that you can't look at it with any freshness. However, if we're working on multiple projects at once, we'll be able to step back, work on something else, and come back to a project with renewed freshness and clarity.

-On a similar note, it's really hard to focus on one thing for a year. By the last few months, you just want to bust through a project and get it over with. It becomes a burden instead of a joy. But a project's last few months are critical. It's when you add that polish and sparkle that really make it stand out. Hopefully, working on multiple games, we'll be able to step back, take breathers, and not hate projects by the end. And that will mean better games.

-Since we’ll be making three games, we don’t have the pressure of picking *the* perfect game. We can choose individual goals to focus on, like making a really casual game, or a really deep puzzle game, or a really rich and appealing game world. Before, I would have thought, “man, I don’t want to work on another puzzler for a year.” But if I get to work on other stuff during that same time, a puzzler sounds like a great idea!

-If we’re starting to realize that a game is a bigger project than we intended, we no longer *have* to cut features. They’ll probably all finish at different times anyway, so if one takes an extra month or two, so what?

-If a game is terrible, or needs to be totally rethought, we can toss it. We won’t be losing everything we’d done for the last few months, only a third of it. And maybe we’ll be able to come back to it later and fix it!

In general, the idea with this new approach is to keep things FRESH! We all love making games. The process should be alive and vibrant! Triple the work, triple the fun!!!