Thanks folks.
Regarding "it's done when it's done." There are exactly two kinds of developers who can do that: those who don't need the income from their games to survive because it is not their main job; and those that don't need the income from their next game because they are already incredibly rich.
The reality is that almost all developers are "push out" developers, as are most software developers in general. It's called a budget and a schedule, and we actually take more liberties wih ours than most developers are able to. Valley 2 was delayed by 3 months because it wasn't good enough prior to that. Shattered Haven was put on ice for 4 years while I figured out its needs. Skyward Collapse has always been meant to be small and focused, and there's nothing that has been cut that I'd want to put back in if I had more time. Google "kill your darlings," seriously.
I think the reason you have this impression of Arcen being "push out" where you might not with other developers is two fold. First, we're open about the process rather than closed. Do you think the PR dudes at most big companies would ever let us even hint at these things? Everything is rosy until the day the studio suddenly folds. And with indie developers, loads of them never make a second game, let alone a sixth. And many of those that do are under just as much deadline pressure as us, if not more. Some have mentioned it, others keep it mum except among colleagues.
Secondly, we don't really toot constantly about our own financial pressures until they start coming to a head. Valley 1 went 6 months over schedule to make sure it was as good as possible at the end, and we had -$6k in money when it launched. Less when Valley 2 launched. I completely avoided taking a salary this year until this month to make sure that the projects could get out in a quality way while we also didn't shed staff.
With Skyward we're showing more discipline, have a stronger central idea, and are not letting scope creep take over the project. Nothing from our original beta-level designs has been cut except for crime, which was a late addition and turned out neither to be fun nor needed. Well, chapmen and traders were also cut for the same reasons, but they were not exactly direct gameplay in the decision making sense. Edicts were cut, but those were not in the original design and they've been actually replaced by something both more complex to code and more interesting. Same with score getting wrapped into that. All of that falls under prototyping iterations rather than cutting for time, anyhow.
Anyway, none of these are the attributes of a developer just pushing stuff out willy nilly. If I had more money then of course I'd take another month at least. Some of that would be extra playtesting time and time for minor polish, and the rest would be so that I could skip working nights and weekends. Other than that... feature-wise nothing would change. That's the idea here: Skyward is tight and interesting, and we'll see how it does. If well, then expansions. It will take multiple expansions to reach the price of a copy of just the base game of Valley 1, and I think this model is smarter for both us and consumers in general.
Hopefully that makes sense. I guess one of the pitfalls about being more publicly open than average is that people attribute industry-wide things just to us. I can tell you that most studios are rushing at least as much as, if not more than, us. If you want some depressing validation of that statement from public anonymous sources, read the submissions to The Trenches. But privately I've heard much the same from developers of all sizes. I want to be able to rise above that like, say, Valve. But I think that Valve Time shows that even that has drawbacks. Still it's what I aspire to, but which only a handful of game developers seem to have achieved. The rest are just blowing sunshine and rainbows in your face while I'm not.
i think it's interesting to show how the hotdog is made, even though its mess messy messy. Seriously, check out The Trenches.
