you’re absolutely right. and this is a very sad thing, as the “professional” part of the industry often does not understand how this kind of balance between design (a iterative process) and good-mood for genius-moments is very hard to control from a time-management point-of-view.

Kyle Gabler wrote on July 3rd, 2007
… so I guess a better way of “keeping to the original design” would be to stick to the original SPIRIT of the design …

yes, absolutely! this is exactly what i tried over the years with my personal projects. i’m always trying hard to balance my personal artist-like creativity and especial huge-amounts of freedom with/against my strugle to build up a “bürgerliche existenz” (bourgeoise existence = the live normal people live, the money/security/family basis of live support). in other words: the balance between art/freedom/risk and work/security/money. in this balancing struggle i’m working on a few projects that aren’t finished yet, due to the fact that my changing life let me leave the project ideads. nearly all projects, and especially the biggest one that shall be finished in 2009 are based on EMOTIONS (i call them emotions, but your word of “spirit” fints fine, too). those emotions i try to stick to, even if i have a game un-developed for more than one year, i can still pickup to work on it. of course code needs to be well documented, workflows needed to be clear, artstyle needed to be flexible, etc. in order for a game to last more than a few work-months.

but the basic problem remains, that more than a year ago the designer (me) had something in his mind (emotions) that he wanted to fullfill with his game. a year later, the code, the gameplay, the game-mechanics, nearly everything that matters in terms of “survive time” can’t tell the emotions. only media (audio, video) can keep the emotion. but especially visual looks age very quick, thus i always keep up my research materials that inspire me to “feel” the original emotions and – and this is my “super” trick: i try to search/create/buy the music for the game first. this way i always have the desired emotions given by music in my head, and can a) stick to the emotions when developing the game in stressful times (parttime, after work, etc.) and also can b) stick to the emotions when continueing the game after a lot of time passed by (weeks, months, even years).

Kyle Gabler wrote on July 3rd, 2007
… anyway, thanks, Daniel/sirleto, for connecting “kyle” to “gay” in Human Brain Cloud. That was real nice…

more than one year after your post, i must confess that i don’t understand a word what you’re talking about. what have i done? was that good or bad? was it intentionally? or was it a crazy (funny) side-effect?

best regards from germany,
daniel