I struggle with polish.
When it comes to polishing up your games for release, what is everyone's approach? Do you throw it all together with dev-art and stand in until the very end and then polish? Do you take it section by section? Do you start with something that looks visually appealing and then work through the programming later?
How much time are y'all usually spending on the process? And do you have any tried and true tips?
I'm very curious to know :)
I think polish is probably quite tricky due to its subjective nature and while you are working on a project; you'll probably get better at refining your visuals, audio and so on, but this can lead to odd shifts in quality or constant refinement of older assets.
I think it's important to sit down and figure out something like a "style guide" that help all the pieces remain cohesive.
When starting a project, I'll usually make enough assets for a small enough section to see how it might go together. These are usually just enough to keep me focused on the direction I'm trying to go, but there's a chance that I might start to like the assets, in which case; I might want to keep them or use them as a style template, so I try to document the process I used to make them.
I might play around with the assets for a bit, usually when I feel like I need a break from coding or when I'm stumped on an algorithm, but I'll always try to keep notes on the process.
At some point, I'll usually find that I think the look, feel and sound somewhat come together, so I'll start trying to turn the notes that I made into general rules, hopefully figuring out a balance of time, efficiency and a quality that I'm comfortable with.
I try to keep the rules just flexible enough to still have some creative fun, but hopefully not allow for sections to feel out of place. Simple and well documented enough to allow for switching between assets and hopefully easy enough to follow that if I take a months break from working on them, I can still make something that doesn't stick out in an obvious way.
I figure everyone is different, but I always feel best when I get to do a little coding, some visual stuff and some audio. Switching between them can be a nice break and sometimes help me relax enough to figure out bits I get stuck on. I think that if I completed all the coding and just had all the visual artwork or music to do, I might get burnt out, but who knows? Maybe that's the smarter way of doing it?
I'm interested in hearing how other people deal with this.
I guess I do something that's a bit mixed. I wouldn't say that I write anything like a professional game design document, but since I just work by myself, I just need to order things in a way that I can refer to later and don't really have to present it in a way that anyone else has to decipher.
I know I'm quite visual, so I'll often make sketches, draw flow charts and make a lot of notes. I'll keep my loose notes mostly separate from the more considered guide-lines, but I'll also write my current focus on a white board to keep myself on track.
If I've come up with some guidelines that I've decided to use for some 2D artwork, I might have rules on resolution, frames-per-second for animations, colour usage and forms to focus on, but I'll also jot down my thoughts on the work in my loose notes, little things like feelings, associations or currently unanswered questions that I get from the work, which might help with additional visual ideas, maybe how I want to compose the music or even make small programming changes.
Sometimes it takes a while, but once the pieces start to work together; it feels like the overall project is going in a specific direction and things start to feel like they logically flow and fit together, so it's more like slotting puzzle pieces into a half completed jigsaw puzzle instead of staring at a blank page.
