You talk a lot of about how time is the most important resource, and I think you've mentioned the pressure to get the project done before. How did the pace of work evolve over the development of the game?
Time is the most expensive because how much it costs to keep things running. So if you were to think about how much the studio costs to run with wages and any subscription fees etc, it gets expensive fast. Tom and I did the bulk of the work, so usually it was two wages we had to cover and our own materials, but if something took a month extra suddenly you're having to pay several more grand to finish something up. And with a large project its very very easy for lots of little things to take longer which can make the project months longer than initially stated which, if you can imagine, can add up to tens of thousands that we needed to ask for that wasn't in our initial budget to the publisher.
The work was very very hard at the end, and part of it was my own fault for not being so careful with my own time management, and also not realising the size of the game we were making (we added bosses and larger levels that wasn't in our initial pitch). At the end of the day though we wanted to make a -good- game. So we put in what it took (in our minds) to make it good, and axed things that seemed cool, but not necessarily adding to the experience beyond what was already there.
Pre-production felt great, production was hard. End of production was the toughest. We finished the redesign of the Duchess boss battle two days before it was released on steam (we had @aruudlay testing the game basically whatever hours they were able to right up to the last minute) and tom uploaded the final build to steam 30 minutes before it went live.
Scope creep is very real, and managing a project to completion is absolutely its own entirely separate skill that is not at all dependent on how good of a programmer/artist/musician/etc you are. It's something I try to tell to developers who are starting their first ever project!
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