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.

What does this really mean? It means "if ain't broken, don't fix it." How do you define a new feature? If the feature requires any new assets, it's a new feature. Post-production should be a time when the team can fix bugs. Art bugs, code bugs. Just fix things. Spend the time making you AI really shine. Make sure that the art is consistent and appealing. Get that frame-rate up from 30 fps to 60.

Save the new features for the next title. Is the new feature really that important. I mean, seriously. That new whiz-bang feature going to bump your meta-critic score from 72 to 73. Maybe.

Having the time to make what you have really good will do more to satisfy the critics and consumers than any new features.