Finish your game

At some point, you’ll have to decide the game is finished. This can be the hardest thing especially when you don’t have any hard deadlines (like most indies). But when you have the time and resources, I do believe it’s worthwhile to make the best game you can. If it’s emotion driven, make it as effective and meaningful and as you can (Journey). If it’s more about the mechanics, explore them to the depth they deserve and make them shine.

But most likely, you don’t have the luxury to do all this. You’ll have to decide where to draw the line and this is once again no easy task. Keep in mind a minimum of what you want your game to be, figure out the essential features. Try to stick with your guns and get everything up to quality.

But regardless if you have deadlines or not, finishing a game is tough. You’ll have to keep solving the problems, not add things, fix bugs, keep failing, keep believing it’s worthwhile and keep motivation up. This can be incredibly challenging, especially over a long period of time. As they say: game development is a marathon, not a sprint.

Finishing a game is a skill on its own. Even if you can’t design or code that well, if you can finish it, you have a valuable skill. You will learn to make tough decisions and cut. You will be familiar with 80% percent of the game development process and its toughest stages.