Abstract
Problem: When game development time and budget get tight, what should developers sacrifice first, and how should they prioritize cuts?
Approach: Tim Cain draws on personal experience shipping games under severe constraints — including a 14-week project (Bard's Tale Construction Set), a shoestring-budget title (Rags to Riches), and Temple of Elemental Evil's brutal 20-month schedule — to outline a practical hierarchy of cuts.
Findings: Cuts should progress from team size and marketing, through content reduction and complexity simplification, down to richness and presentation. The most effective strategy is to lean into your team's strengths and ruthlessly eliminate everything that doesn't serve them.
Key insight: The best complaint players can have about your game is that they wanted more of it — so a shorter, polished game beats an ambitious, broken one.
1. The Good-Fast-Cheap Triangle
Tim opens by referencing the classic project management triangle: good, fast, and cheap — pick two. He's skeptical of the model, noting that once you go cheap, it's hard to get either good or fast. Still, he's shipped games under exactly these constraints and has developed a practical framework for what to cut.
2. Reduce Team Size
The most direct lever. A large chunk of any budget goes to the team, so shrinking it automatically shrinks costs. If time is the constraint rather than money, consider external contractors — but Tim warns this often backfires. Contract art frequently needs redos to match the internal style, contract code often needs optimization passes, and managing enough external developers requires a dedicated producer, adding back to costs.
3. Cut Marketing
Marketing budgets have grown enormous — Tim has worked on games where marketing exceeded the production budget. The reason is discoverability: with so many games on Steam, even excellent titles can vanish without promotion. You can cut marketing to save money, but you'll need creative alternatives (viral strategies, influencer outreach) or simply hope quality alone carries the game.
4. Reduce Content
Make a shorter game. Cut levels, cut areas, reduce NPCs (and all their associated inventory, balancing, voiceover, and dialogue work). Tim's philosophy: "If the biggest complaint people have about your game is they want more of it — that's the complaint I want to have." Fewer areas also means less art, since environments within a smaller game can reuse assets cohesively without players noticing repetition.
5. Reduce Complexity
Simplify the game systems. Fewer character builds, fewer weapons and armor types, fewer branching choices. Tim specifically calls out UI as a hidden time sink — in his experience, UI consistently takes longer than anyone plans and gets reworked repeatedly. Minimizing UI elements (replacing icons and popups with sound effects, for example) can save enormous effort.
5.1. Consider a Simpler Genre
RPGs inherently contain everything — exploration, dialogue, combat. Shifting toward a genre that drops one of these pillars (adventure games without combat, FPS games without dialogue) eliminates entire categories of work and the team members needed to produce them.
6. Reduce Richness
Distinct from complexity, richness is about immersion and polish. Practical cuts include:
- Voiceover — reduce it or go text-only
- Rendering features — lighting, reflections, and similar visual polish take significant time. Tim notes he's never seen anyone refuse to buy a game solely because mirrors don't show reflections
- 3D → 2D — while 2D games aren't always faster, they generally require less art or faster-to-create art
- Cinematics → text slides — Pillars of Eternity used drawn images with text overlays for opening cinematics; Star Wars-style text crawls can replace expensive in-game sequences
6.1. Cinematics Cut Both Ways
Tim makes a nuanced point: cinematics can sometimes save time by replacing an entire playable area that exists only to deliver a plot point. If the player always walks into a room and discovers a dead body with no variation, a short cinematic accomplishes the same thing without building a full level.
7. Lean Into Your Strengths
Tim's overarching principle: understand what your team does well and do more of that. If you have a strong narrative designer, make a combat-free RPG where talking replaces fighting. If your strength is systems and combat design, cut dialogue and make a pure action game. The goal is to replace expensive, time-consuming elements with things your team can produce quickly and at high quality.
8. Tim's Experience
Tim grounds all of this in real projects:
- Bard's Tale Construction Set — completed in 14 weeks
- Rags to Riches — tiny team, shoestring budget; Tim was the only programmer, the producer doubled as designer
- Temple of Elemental Evil — originally budgeted at 18 months, received only 2 extra months when D&D shifted from 3rd edition to 3.5
His closing advice: of course the best answer is to get more time and more budget — but that's never really the answer, is it?
9. References
- Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APHKu89av6U