Will Wright & Judgment Day

I recently saw a great quote from Will Wright in an interview regarding Spore.  I think that it really does a great job of highlighting the reasoning behind the concept of Judgement Day that I talked about yesterday in my post on “The Hoyt Method.”

“…as we get closer and closer, it’s like ‘Oh, there’s these last few things that’ll just make it perfect,’ and ‘Oh, we’ve got to get this in.’ Things become visible to you toward the end of the process. Design opportunities that weren’t obvious before, and so they weren’t part of your schedule, but then you uncover these possibilities, and it’s like, ‘Oh God, I don’t want to leave that on the table. It would be so painful to do that.’ So that’s probably the overall reason why the game is taking so long.”

It’s nice to know that even the greatest game designer in the industry acknowledges that it’s impossible to know everything about your game at the end of the design phase.  The process of “discovery” as you develop is inevitable.  Therefore, leaving time in your schedule to incorporate these discoveries is critical if you want to allow your game to be all that it can be.

The full article/interview with Mr. Wright can be found here.