This is super relevant. Related to that, there's another significant element affected by the iterative process: often feedback (or approval to proceed) comes from folks who are distracted by the current, unfinished state of something, when they should be evaluating the concept. https://twitter.com/danctheduck/status/1344357310399877120

I have countless examples of this, but here's one: at one point we were working on a game and building a level. At that point, it was in whitebox, so we essentially had the rough level geometry, some very basic functionality ("find switch to open door"), and that was it.

We did, however, have a plan for things. We knew what kind of encounters we were going to have at what point, how we would build up atmosphere, and what it was all leading to. None of that was in the whitebox, but we had it all worked out in considerable detail.

This is pretty typical for designing a level: you plan things out on paper, and then you start building it, and you keep iterating things based on what you find as you keep developing it. You don't first finish completely one room, and then move to the next one. It's incremental.

Anyway, we had the plan. It was gonna be a whole thing where you go through a creepy old building, and we build up the atmosphere as you proceed -- you hear weird stuff, you see figures that dart out of sight, the music builds, etc. Not horror, but tense. You get the picture.

So it's all wonky lighting and creaky floors and dust falling off ceiling beams, whispered voices and so forth. And then, once you reach a certain point, it gets Super Fucking Weird, you emerge out of this claustrophobic space into a much larger area, and BOOM, BIG THINGS HAPPEN.

And I mean, it wasn't rocket science. It was a good plan and it could've been a really fun scene, but we weren't doing anything that hasn't been done before. We knew it was gonna be a cool sequence, but it wasn't like anything we were doing was untested, as such.

And it ran into endless trouble, because the level needed to be approved before we could proceed to graybox and start adding detail into this level that now, really, only had the rough geometry of it there, pretty much. And that was impossible to get approved. "It wasn't fun."

And the reason it wasn't fun was because it was boring. There was nothing happening, you spent several minutes just running through white, shapeless corridors. No music, no animations, no nothing. We had a bit of text for info, like "here's where the first weird thing happens."

And the people -- the one person, really -- who was approving it just couldn't... see it. He was like, there's no enemies here, there's nothing to do, there's no atmosphere, it isn't spooky. But we were in whitebox, it was supposed to be as simple as possible. That was the point.

Because at that stage, what was supposed to get approved was the basic geometry and the overall plan for the level. But the objection wasn't "the geometry is bad" or "I don't think this plan is good." It was "this is boring because nothing happens."

And the discussion that followed was incredibly painful, because of course the level team's argument was "yeah, but it won't be boring once the environment art and lighting and audio and dialogue and animations and polish and everything else is in there."

"But it's boring now."

And the problem genuinely was that he couldn't imagine it, or get past there not being anything in there RIGHT THEN. This wasn't a problem with levels that were all combat, because you could drop in placeholder enemies in the levels, and that he could understand.

In fact, even those enemies were actually outside of the scope of the whitebox; technically, they shouldn't even have been there, people just added them because it was fast and easy to drop them in, so why not? But this part of this level didn't feature enemies, so...

It was an incredibly frustrating process. I don't quite remember how it ended, to be honest, because it turned out not to matter; we cut the entire level and a couple of others from the game because we realized we didn't have the time for them, so... ehh, one of those things.

But this was not an isolated incident, it happens all the time: somebody sees a placeholder and just... can't see beyond its present state to the intent behind it. It's not even that they question the intent, they just go "but it's bad now."

It's difficult.