Back in April 2023, I said this:

… what is planned to be a monthly series of devlogs…

You may notice that the last time I posted a devlog was 6 months ago. So, uh, yeah. Sorry.

You see, as I finished up my last devlog, I realized I was about to smack headfirst into one of gamedev’s biggest hurdles.  It’s a challenge that every indie dev faces at some point in their career.  Some people take years to overcome it, and some never manage it at all.  But, with time running out and my back to the wall, I steeled my heart and set out to do the impossible:  it was time…

To finish my game.

Ok, ok, jokes aside, finishing a game is notoriously difficult.  Go to any gamedev community out there and you’ll find all sorts of questions, complaints, and memes about it.

So in today’s Grippy Golf devlog, I’m gonna walk you through my personal journey as I brought my game to the finish line.  Along the way, we’ll discuss why this problem is so common and so difficult, and what methods have worked for me to overcome it.

Fair warning, a lot of the advice I’m going to give in this video isn’t exactly what you’d call “fun”.  In fact, it’s pretty un-fun.  But that’s also kinda the point.  You’ll see what I mean.

First let’s set the stage.  It’s August 2023.  The very core of my game is finished:  it’s a golf-themed, fast-paced platformer where you can boost yourself around and stick to objects in the world.  It has somewhat-functional online multiplayer, a smattering of experimental powerups, some nice 3D models, and 7 greyboxed levels.  Not awful, but not a lot.

You see, up until this point I had been in what I call the “Prototyping” phase of game development.  This is the part of development where you’re still trying to nail down exactly what the game you’re making even is.  You’re just playing in a giant sandbox, jamming pieces together and seeing how they fit.  There’s very little structure, no clearly-defined plan, and right now that’s probably a good thing.  But    as we’ll see, that philosophy is more or less the exact opposite of what you need to finish a game.  So the first step is to transition out of that phase and leave it behind.

For me, this transition happened because I wanted to have the game out by the end of 2023.

This brings us to my first major piece of advice: 

Set a Deadline

The unbounded creativity and freedom of the Prototyping phase can be very difficult to escape.  After all, there’s always more features you could add, new ideas you could try, on and on and on into infinity.  You need some external force to break that cycle and keep you from relapsing, and a fixed due date can do just that.

To be clear, in the real world there is no such thing as an absolute, immovable deadline.  Just look at almost any public construction project, for example.  But the stronger your deadline, the more it will force you to be disciplined.  Conversely, every time you allow your deadline to move, it will have less power.  So do your best to make it as rigid as possible.  Ideally, share it on social media so that your players will hold you accountable.  If that’s too stressful (which is totally understandable), at least tell some friends or family members.

It’s worth mentioning here:  I know many indie devs aren’t doing this full time.  I’ve been there too, coming home in the evenings, plopping down in front of the computer, and trying to cram in a couple hours of work before you fall asleep.  If that’s you, that’s awesome, I believe in you, you’ve got this.  But don’t think that this advice doesn’t apply to you, because it absolutely still does.  If anything, it’s even more important to hold on to whatever structure you can to keep you on track.

Anyway, now you have a deadline, great.  However, some scary due date off on the horizon isn’t, by itself, very helpful.  So the next step is to define how you’re going to meet that deadline.  You need a Plan.

Make a Plan

To clarify, I don’t just mean writing down a to-do list on a sticky note or in a Trello board.  That by itself won’t tell you anything about how to meet a distant deadline.  No, your plan needs to have dates.  It needs to have predictions about how long each task will take and it needs to specify in what order those tasks will happen.  Only then can you actually get an idea of how long it will take you to make the entire game.

There’s lots of tools out there for making this kind of plan, but my weapon of choice is something called a Gantt chart.  It’s effectively a graph that lays out tasks on the vertical axis, and time on the horizontal axis.

It’s a powerful tool, but it is a lot to deal with, so your mileage may vary.  I’d recommend GanttProject, which is both free and open-source, my favorite.

Now, laying out this kind of high-level, long-term plan is not easy.  Your estimates for how long each task will take will be inaccurate, and sometimes by hilariously large margins.  But despite all that, I still absolutely recommend it for two important reasons.

The first reason is that it forces you to think about all the systems that are necessary for a finished game.  Not just the gameplay, but visual effects, the sound effects, the music, the HUD, the menus, the settings, the saving, the credits, the localization, the achievements, the store page, the marketing.  There’s a lot going on! 

For Grippy Golf, I was completely caught off guard by just how many menus I needed to create.  Until I made my plan, a lot of the less-obvious work had been invisible to me, I just hadn’t really thought about it.

Now, some of you may be confused as to why I started with the deadline, and then tried figuring out how long the game will take to make.  Isn’t that backwards?  But that’s not an accident.  To see why, let’s take a look at my initial plan for Grippy Golf.

Ok, so here I’ve started with the singleplayer levels.  There are 9 worlds, and each one contains a set of levels that needs to be greyboxed out and tested.  Once that’s done, I can fill in the level with actual assets to make everything look pretty.  Multiplayer levels are after that, and need to go through a similar process.

Then, there’s all the incomplete powerups and other interactables.  Each of these needs a 3D model, visual and sound effects, and so on.  Next there’s the models and level geometry for the various environments, then a ton of different menus and UI, then collectibles, then the music, then some various odds and ends, and lastly the final round of playtesting.  

Nice!  There’s some things missing, but that looks alright for a first pass.  So with that all put together, it looks like my game will be done in November… 2024.  Uh oh.

This is the second reason that you should make a Plan:  you will discover that you do not have enough time.  It’s basically unavoidable.  There’s just something about our poor overworked monkey brains that sucks at long-term planning.

In response, you could push back your deadline, but I’ve already talked about why this isn’t the best idea.  So if you ever want to finish your game, you need to take the other path: 

Cut Your Scope

Lots of devs will tell you that you need to start small.  Take your game idea, and cut it in half.  Then do it again.  And again.  Annnd again.  And one more time, for good measure.  There, now that’s a game you might actually be able to make.

However, this advice doesn’t only apply to the start of development, but to the entire process.  At some point you will probably realize that your idea wasn’t quite as small as you thought it was, or that over time you’ve added a bunch of new ideas and it’s gotten out of hand.  When that happens, you need to make some painful decisions.  You need to take a long, honest look at your game, find its core, and cut away the parts that aren’t as important.

For Grippy Golf, the first thing to go was multiplayer.  This one really hurt.  I’d spent so long getting it to work, even making an entire devlog about it, and now I was tossing it to the side.  But it was the necessary choice, getting rid of not just the levels and playtesting, but also most of the unfinished powerups and several of the more difficult menus.  I consoled myself by promising that I would add it in an update some day down the line.  And I will!  I’m holding myself to that one.

The other major change was that I decided to hire a composer, rather than trying to do the music by myself.  This was absolutely the correct decision:  it saved me months of work, let me meet a pretty great guy (Ram99, they have a youtube channel, go check them out), and the tracks are much better than anything I can produce.  The tradeoff, of course, is that you need to have money, but in this case it was well worth it.

So now I’ve grit my teeth, and cut out huge parts of my game.  Did this sacrifice buy me enough time to finish everything by the end of 2023?  Well, uh… no!  Even with all that, I was still over the line by a couple months, and ended up moving my deadline to the end of February 2024.

That makes this a good time to bring up that yes, I’ve talked a lot about keeping your deadline as fixed as possible, in order to maintain discipline and keep your scope under control.  But there are times when cutting scope is no longer realistic, and you need to move the deadline instead.  Just do your best to be honest with yourself about why you’re moving the deadline.

It’s worth noting that I ended up going through this whole process again a few months later.  It became clear that I had been too optimistic about how quickly I could churn out new levels.  I ended up cutting even more, trimming the number of singleplayer worlds down from 9 to 7, with that 7th world being just one, optional level.  So clearly, there’s more for me to improve here as well.

As I warned you at the beginning, this is all starting to sound pretty un-fun, pretty pessimistic.  Maybe you’re someone working on their dream game, or maybe you’re just doing this as a hobby, or maybe both, and here I am telling you to straighten up, make a five-year plan, tear off half your game and throw it away.  I can totally understand wanting to reject what I’m saying here.

However:  making a game, even a small one, is a huge undertaking.  It’s a project, and that means that you will need to become a project manager to see it through.  Yes, that will require sacrifices.  But a small, complete game is worth infinitely more than a huge game that never actually exists.

At the very least, it’s worked for me.  By setting myself a deadline and sticking to it as best I could; by laying out a detailed plan and seeing where it led; by hardening my heart and cutting off what I had to; I was able to release Grippy Golf on Steam.  It’s not exactly a huge commercial success, but it exists and it’s complete and I am legitimately proud of creating it.  And I’d like to think that that’s worth something.

Hey there, thanks for reading.  This article ended up kinda turning into “Project Planning 101”, but hopefully you still found it interesting.

For those of you who’ve finished a game in the past, do you agree with what I’ve said here?  What advice would you give? 

Oh, and if Grippy Golf looked fun to you, please check it out on Steam!

Until next time,

Cheers!