If you’re writing an app, you want it to look good. While it’s important to keep that goal in mind, it’s also important to remember that even highly-designed software like video games will appear ugly and incomplete for most of its development cycle.
In a lengthy post at Kotaku, writer Anthony Burch discusses how many of the assumptions he made when blogging about games proved spectacularly wrong when he actually started working at a games studio. We particularly noticed the section called “Games look like complete arse for 90% of their production”, which makes a point that applies to all kinds of software development:
It speaks to one of the great difficulties of game development that I never knew about: how do you judge the quality of something that isn’t even close to looking complete? Audiovisual feedback is one of the most important things to making a game feel good . . . but often times it’s also the thing that comes online latest in development. When a new mechanic feels bad, is it because the mechanic itself is wrong, or because the feedback isn’t in yet to make it feel good?
Check out the full post linked below for lots more insights into the game development process (and why you should always be cautious before making assumptions about how development works).
5 Things I Didn’t Get About Making Video Games (Until I Did It) [Kotaku]
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