I’m making a confession today, I’m suffering from incurable feature creep. Feature creep is defined by Wikipedia as “the ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, such as in computer software. Extra features go beyond the basic function of the product and so can result in over-complication, or “featuritis”, rather than simple design.“
That basically means that whenever I develop a game, I have to fight against the uncontrollable urge to make it bigger, better and more complex to the point it is difficult to even finish it. This is very problematic because it makes developing the simplest games a long and tiring process and prevents them from actually being simple, which is often a big downside. I recently experienced a very concrete example.
As regular readers already know, I am currently developing my first Android game in my (very sparse) free time. What you might not know is that I’m also currently developing my second Android game. Seeing as my first game was taking an unusual long time to complete and being very eager to finally release a game to the Android market, I decided to invest an hour or so in porting an old game of mine for this new platform. I figured it would be a good way to go through the whole process in a time-inexpensive manner.
As you might have guessed, I couldn’t manage to just port the 2 year old game as it was. I started fixing a few things, then added a few features here and there and it quickly turned into something unmanageable. As of now, I have two unfinished games laying around on my desktop and don’t have quite enough time to finish either.
Fortunately, summer is right at our doors and it should give me sufficient free time to finish both in the following weeks. Either way, I have learned a lesson the hard way.
