To Feature Freeze Or Not To Feature Freeze

I’m giving myself a hard deadline of the end of the year to release this game. It’s going out in whatever state it’s in so I can move on to the next project. I can’t stop thinking of new things I want to implement, which, naturally, increases the difficulty of finishing this thing exponentially. Most software companies deal with this by implementing a product-wide feature freeze which means nothing new gets added until everything they’ve already committed to doing is tested and ready for public consumption… but I just had a really good idea that I think is important enough to include! Occupants! Self-driving cars are pretty useless if they don’t drive people around, so, I want to take the ragdolls and stick them in the car by attaching their hands and feet to the steering wheels with some basic collision detection to determine if the occupants were harmed. This also helps with the scoring system as some companies will value their occupants more than others ;).

The other idea I had was using some sort of soft body/destrictible mesh for the cars and the props in TestTown because I think people will have a lot of fun knocking stuff down and it’s a good way to determine the amount of property damage the player has incurred. However, this could take a long time to implement if I can’t find an existing system that does a good enough job.

I’m going to add these two features to the board and stop there. Honestly, if I can ship this game with just the prototypes of these features I’ll be happy. Thanks for reading!