Keeping it simple

Thanks to Civ 3 I picked up a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, which made it into my book.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

And so we make a post to keeping things simple, or KISS (Keep it simple, stupid.)

If you are making your first game, for gods sakes, make it something easy, simple, and fun. Putting 16 months into your first project is like investing all of your money in a single stock. Any smart investor will tell you it is a bad idea, and any veteran game designer will tell you the same thing about games.

Create a game you THINK you can do in 6 months. It will actually take you 12... and along the way you will learn MANY valuable lessons. This is much better than making a game you hope to complete in 16 months and finishing it 32 months later (this is NOT unrealistic, ask Inhuman Games (www.inhumangames.com) and Trash about their 5 year development cycle).

If you buy my book you'll at least have some idea of what to do and what not to do; but some lessons can not be learned from a book.

Oh, and here's another witty quote by the author on a similar subject:
"Avoid feature creep like you would avoid a movie named the same thing."

PS: The book will go to final editing in 2-4 weeks. Then I will do a test publish run and make sure it ends up looking alright. If anyone has a cover artist they reccomend please let me know!