finish-it

Finish it

Finishing is a separate skill, and a finished mediocre game proves more than a brilliant fragment. Projects die in two loops: the restart loop (skills improved mid-project, so the dev remakes early content sideways forever — "your code will always be a mess") and the polish loop (near-done, endlessly refining details out of fear of judgment). Diagnose the loop before intervening. And remember: the last 10% is really 90% — menus, death states, audio plumbing, deploy are the game too.

Scoping a new game (so this skill is never needed)

• One core mechanic, one level/arena, one win condition, one lose condition. Everything else is stretch.
• One-sentence pitch before code. Features not in the sentence need explicit justification.
• Budget 50/50: half for the playable loop, half for the unfun tail. If the loop fills the budget, the scope is wrong.
• Prototype-first split (jam culture): playable ugly loop in the first ~5% of the time; the rest is feel, art, sound, content.
• Use the engine at hand (Spelunky shipped in Game Maker), reuse and generate assets without shame.
• Tiny finished games grow up: Celeste began as a 4-day PICO-8 jam game. The jam-sized version is the validation step, not a compromise.

The cut list

• Keep a NEXT_GAME.md. Every mid-build idea ("what if it had shops / multiplayer / procgen") goes there, not in the build. Save it for the next one — finish this one first (Yu).
• Default cut order for browser games: extra levels → extra enemy/item types → meta-progression → settings menus → narrative → leaderboards.
• Never cut: restart flow, lose/win states, audio toggle.
• When behind: cut features. One mechanic deep beats three shallow.
• If a project must die, the successor is smaller, not bigger.

When is the core loop enough?

Stop adding mechanics when: a new player understands it without instructions in <30s, a session has tension (can lose) and release (can win/score), and a player voluntarily restarts once. From that moment, every proposal to add is scope creep — route it to NEXT_GAME.md and switch to finishing mode.