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LESSON 72

No matter what the schedule says, give the game enough time to get it right.

Guns & Butter was a collection of clever, occasionally brilliant ideas crammed together with insufficient integration. The input/output charts of the economy should have shown the player the intricacies of a working economy in a way that was easy and fun. The facial displays were a huge technological leap forward. And the diplomatic system could have made the game especially interesting. But these good ideas did not perform well together, and the result was the worst game I ever designed. Sadly, this could have been one of my best games. I attribute my failure to a single blunder: my failure to properly polish the game.

I was in too much of a hurry to get the game done quickly; I should have ignored the deadline and insisted on getting it perfect before I released it. There was a reason for my imprudent haste: I had been approached by another publisher asking me to build an environmental game, but they had a tight deadline imposed by licensing considerations. In order to be certain of completing the environmental game in time to meet their deadline, I had to rush Guns & Butter. This was stupid, short-term thinking on my part. With two or three months of careful playtesting and polishing, I could have pulled the pieces together and made the whole system sing in harmony. Instead, to save three months of time, I threw away the year of work I had put into Guns & Butter. Not too swift, eh? I paid the price for my stupidity: The game bombed and I never earned a penny of royalties. The advance was all I got from the project.