I was reading a thread on the Game Programmer mailing list the other day that was interesting. A guy had posted a “help wanted” notice for a game he was developing. As the conversation about the game wound on, the poster made a comment about how he had re-written his engine a few times to incorporate new things. This lead to a small flurry of responses, most of which were chock full of wisdom: Stop re-writing and just finish what you’ve got.
That is very good advice. I started writing a game a while back (like over a year ago), but I just kinda stopped for some reason. Recently I’ve been thinking of new projects I *could* start doing, and in one case I actually started slinging some code. When I read the post that advised the guy to just finish the project with an engine (and not re-write it from scratch), that hit me like I thunderbolt.
It doesn’t matter how “good” something is if you never ship it out the door. Sometime you’ve just got to cut your losses and implement those features in the next release. To borrow a phrase from Xzibit, sometimes you’ve got to be a Mack truck: Go the distance and deliver the goods.