The importance of adjusting your release schedule

Disclaimer: This DevLog is intended to help anyone, who is in a similar situation we are in at the moment. Everyone has to make their own decisions. This merely is our own honest view and opinion, based on our experience. We would love to hear from you, what you think about it all. We wish you all the success and fun you deserve with the development and release of your game! eXplore Studio

Many of us know the difficult task of committing to a release date and sticking to it... without overworking and falling into panic and crunch mode. eXplore Studio is an international start-up with 4 permanent people in our development team, and a wide range of freelancers who help us with art, music, and localisations. We develop our games following an Agile approach with regular integration and packaging of intermediate versions of our games. This helps us to reduce risk and identify any problems in the games early. At the centre is what is most important - the health and wellbeing of each team member! By the way, if everyone is in a good place, enjoys work and even has fun, the games will always be much better.

But when we come closer to the planned release date, like we do for our first game to be released during this summer, we keep finding things we still need to correct and add to the game. Beta-testing is great, but it brings about lots of additional things we want to add now. Also, some of the features we had planned turn out to take longer because the solutions are much more complex than we had anticipated.

We suddenly see ourselves confronted with making a terrible choice: 

Do we stick to the release date? Or do we stick to our sustainable way of developing the game? 

We can't do both. If we maintain the release date that means a lot more work per week for a couple of months, including long nights and weekends. We will suffer from stress, accumulated fatigue, and our physical and mental health is likely to deteriorate. Fun will be hidden behind stress. On the other hand, if we maintain our sustainable way of working, we will be fine, but certainly not able to meet our release date. A terrible choice to make! Or is it really?

Let me be very clear: You are in indie game development because you want to express yourself in liberty, you want to enjoy the ride, you want to give the world something of yourself, a beautiful piece of art, a beautiful story, hours, and days of fun playing your game! You do not want to be pushed around (not even by yourself)! So, do not be a slave to your release date decision that was probably made on over-optimistic estimates, because you wanted to get the game out into the world, and perhaps, because you may finally need some money! You and your health is so much more important! Also, a great game will always be great, while a rushed game will always be flawed. Nobody will remember, whether you released on time, but they will remember your great game!

Is it easy to postpone the release? No, we feel like we failed to plan properly, we may even be disappointed with ourselves. But remember that we did plan that date in light of what we knew and estimated some time ago. Now things have changed, and our estimates are more accurate. Only fools don't change. However, it takes a lot of courage to change the date, because deep inside we may think, what other people will think of us?

Please always have the courage to adjust your release schedule if this is necessary! For your own sake, the sake of the people working with you, and the sake of all the people who will play your game - they will love it!!!