Submitting my first Game: 3 Quick Lessons Learned from Spring Thing

[AmandaB]

@dee_cooke

it’s possible to get so bogged down in perfectionism that you’d never get anything released without these external deadlines

After just submitting my second game, I’ve come to feel the same way about “finishing” a game as I do about renovating a house. You’re done renovating when you run out of patience and money. You’re done with your game when you run out of patience and time. With both my games, I got to the point where I just could not look at it ever again after all that time obsessing and tweaking.

@dee_cooke

I still find it incredibly useful to have a playtester who doesn’t play a lot of IF, but I think it’s more beneficial to have playtesters from within the community as well, because they will know from their own experience where the bugs are likely to be found, and will have more of a sense of what the author will need from the testing

I could never have finished either game without the testers here. And I’ve come to understand how important it is to have testers who will be really hard on your game and try to break it, which requires people experienced enough to know where the weak spots are likely to be.

@pinkunz

Minimum Viable Product. The concept being this would be the simplest most scaled back version of what you could charitably consider a finished game.

This is totally foreign to me. My nature is to complicate things, not simplify them. MVP seems like an excellent lesson for a beginner to learn, but I wonder if I’m capable of learning it.