Today’s Smashing Ideas Blog Post concludes our three part series  from Senior Designer, Chris Hannon, and his thoughts on this year’s Seattle Casual Connect. 

I thoroughly enjoyed game producer Matt Johnston of Pop Cap Games talk: Polish: the last 1% is the hardest.  The final 1%  is often the area that can be most overlooked.  But Matt’s main point was this: the game with the most polish is the game that will stand out most in a flooded market of competitors. Why? People like quality, even when they are not consciously aware of it. Like any well developed and polished product, many of its best attributes are in fact the ones that you DON’T have to notice. It makes you competitive.  I’ve condensed his rules of thumb and my takeaway from Matt’s discussion:

Care about everything:  Even if you’re not a programmer on your project, care about what’s happening in your coworkers domains of expertise. Often, we all get too close to what we are making and a set of different eyes and opinions will always improve the end product.  PLAY YOUR OWN GAME. Sometimes months can go by between stages of development and a lot can change. It seems obvious but replay, re-evaluate.

Iteration Iteration Iteration:  Given tight development cycles, this concept can be easy to want to ignore, but it is the key to bringing everything in your game up to the bar you set.  If you hit that bar, maybe you need to push it further. Basically, as the title says, repeat iterations of quality checks, refining details and stepping back to look at the big picture are how polish goes on: layer by layer.

Make it (polish) part of the process:  If the team doesn’t subscribe to this idea of polish, or worse, the company culture doesn’t, then figure out how to implement it.  If you make everyone on your team responsible, give them the ownership of the quality standard, then the whole team signs off on there the bar is raised to.

Allow for failure:  It has to be one of the oldest saying that never goes away for a reason. Failure is the only teacher of success. It’s no different here, apply what has failed with each iteration.

Where’s the appeal?:  Develop the skills to now where the important points in the game that the customer will focus (UI, Help screen, Audio)…make those areas your prime focus until you can’t figure out how to refine them further. Audio for example, is an area that is largely ignored till the last moment in game development. And yet it makes up for a HUGE part of the experience if done well. George Lucas once said that sound was 75% of the experience of his films. 

 Know when to quit:  “It’s not a quitting point- it’s a quality point.  I thought this was a great way to keep everybody on the same page. Early research of games you like early one can help you set/raise the bar to where it needs to be, and keep the team consistent in its goal. Need more time to hit the mark? Justify it up the chain by telling the truth: a more polished game sells better.

A great example of being acutely aware of these points would be the original game  Polar Bear Payback  Smashing Ideas released for Adult Swim.  The game is based on a concept by writer/director Jack Perez (of Mega-Shark vs. Giant Octopus fame) and boasts a display of  arcade action, is visually stunning, darkly humorous, and features rock solid game play that stands with some of the best Flash brawlers on the web.  What are your thoughts about the final 1%?  Share them here and thanks for reading my posts! 

-Chris Hannon