How Many Rebuilds Is Normal?

[robproctor83]

Hello, I have a question I would like to know from the community, and that is, in general how many times do you rebuild something before you consider it good enough to publish? And also, what is the most times you have had to rebuild something?

I ask because I have a really bad habit of revisiting old concepts and thinking, hmm that needs to be rebuilt. In my defense a lot of times it has to be rebuilt because it needs to function differently, but even things like styling changes, or variable naming differences, or just anything.... Even if it works I'll go back pick it apart and start refining it. Rebuilding and rebuilding over and over.

 

[Yal]

It's a common pattern. It's more fun to start something new than to polish something old until it's good. This tends to lead to a never-ending cycle where you tweak and tweak something until you either get bored with the project and move on to greener pastures, or the engine breaks down after all the tweaks made it unstable, making it impossible to finish the project for one reason or another.

If you find yourself in this situation, you should try to force yourself to release the game anyway... you can't achieve perfection (assuming you're just human), so the closer to perfection you're trying to get, the less likely you are to be able to finish the project. Masters make mistakes too, they're just fixing them so quickly nobody notices. (Which is called "patches" and "hotfixes" when it comes to game releases, and completely normal these days. People will be happy seeing you fix issues quickly, not berate you for letting the issues show up in the first place)

 

[Rob]

For me, generally it's "Is it good enough to work as needed?" and then I wanna get on with something else. Sometimes I need to remake whole systems tho...