Dev Journal 01

The Curse of:

"That would be cool"

There's a slew of terms, scope creep, project bloat, drift, bells and whistles and so on; most carry the same miasma around them, the loss of control of a project.

But with reality, it's always a little more complicated.

Every game (and most projects) start with the feeling of excitement, the pristine clean clarity of only forward as there is no backward step. Possibilities abound, even with a narrow defined scope, as there's so many nuances to every aspect of what must take place to achieve the end goal.

It is a good time and a great feeling.

But as time ticks forward and time is put into a project, we move down the journey of a project; possibilities narrow a design decisions take shape, increasing the work required to go back and change. The walls on the sides of journey change from being built out of scope and adherence to a plan, to thicker intractably menacing walls of inertia.

Momentum of a project will keep a project moving in a direction, even if change might be for the better. When working on a major project, hearing "that would be cool" will keep you up.

Additional scope, unplanned changes, "new direction", all apart of "that would be cool."

As i work on TrekSplat, I often think of "that would be cool" if this thing did that, or this system needs to be implemented at this moment. Thousands ideas from the era of project start will replay for me all of these grand interlocking systems. But as time progresses, the walls along to journeys(project) end change from made of design docs and scope to the intractability of inertia.

I have found when i suffer from the curse of "that would be cool", i temper it by writing down the idea and how it benefits the game and as inertia carries be down the path, i look for where i can make doors in the walls around me.