Deadlines. Love them or Hate them. Evil things that demand overtime from underpaid artists and engineers, or the only thing producers can use to nail down those creative types to actually deliver assets.
I don’t want to get into the pros or cons of deadlines, I just want to share my perspective as an indie, and how some deadlines helped us ship our latest free to play, iOS title, Block You.
As an indie developer, the ‘It ships when it is ready’ mentality is very prevalent. Not constrained by typical oversight, with costs less than visible than normal (didn’t get paid this week, won’t get paid next week, so who cares if it slips a week), it is easy for an indie to keep plugging away at code and art assets, watching the days and week fly by.
That is exactly what happened to me on my first two games. Both missed their original timelines for over 50%. Sure chalk it up to learning curves and features creeps, but really, how can I plan a 6 or 12 months of releases and projects, if what I call a 3 month project really takes me 5 month to do. So here is my take at trying to set some deadlines, add some time pressure into my development cycles and see how I do.