Every software developer will tell you that last 10% of any project takes up 90% of the time. Tim Ruswick from Game Dev Underground calls this dark work – and he is accurate.
It’s the accumulation of small features that are not integral to gameplay, but nevertheless required by the game. Things like settings menu, display choices, pause menu, translations – all these things take up a lot of time, and they are usually pushed back the development cycle into a steaming pile of dark matter that will eat up all of your development hours.
I choose to handle black matter sooner rather than later.
Today I made a first stub of the settings menu. Right now you can just pick your language and basic graphics settings, but it is a fully functional system and it is working right now. Now I just need to fill in all the required settings and I’ll be able do some fun stuff again.