How do you keep your project on schedule? How do you hit your milestones at the end of the project? You have to take feature lock down seriously. Let’s say that your features are considered locked three-months prior to first submission. That gives you three months to do a real polishing.

The “polish pass” is something that is paid a lot of lip-service in the industry but doesn’t seem to be taken seriously. Sure, Valve delivers polished content, but Valve spent five years delivering Half-Life 2. Not an option that many of us have. Let’s think of polishing as post-production instead. Post, from the Latin postquam, meaning afterwards. That’s right, after production has ended. (more…)