#10 - Assume that you need the best of everything

This is the most difficult thing in the world to do: decide when enough is enough.  If you want the best AI, best 3D, best networking technology, best music, 3D sound and support for every nifty input peripheral in the world, you'll spend $10,000,000 and die of exhaustion long before your game is ready to ship.

In all likelihood, your means are limited.  Therefore, you must decide early on which unique selling points (USP) you can't afford to give up, which would be nice to have if you have time and money left at the end of the project (you probably won't), and where you can get by with a journeyman's effort.  If you are doing a shooter, you probably don't need to equip your zombies with neural networks and hidden Markov models to learn the player's behaviour.  On the other hand, for a turn-based strategy game, you don't need dead-reckoning to predict opponents' positions, and since network lag is not critical, a standard DirectPlay layer is probably enough.

Know where to save, and you'll have more to spend on what counts.  (And by the way: multi-player is a feature like any other.  It costs time and money to implement, and with everybody going after the deathmatch crowd, you might do well to ditch the networking and release a really good single-player game!)

Conclusion

Game development is rewarding work, but it is tough work.  Believe me, there is no need to make it any worse than it needs to be.  Hopefully, this article will help you make it a little easier on yourselves!

François-Dominic Laramée, January 2000