Gamasutra have put up excerpts from Game Developer's Tales of Monkey Island postmortem, penned by former Telltale marketing coordinator Emily "fov" Morganti. It explores What Went Right and What Went Wrong during the development of Tales, and is a good read all around.
This particular bit caught my eye:
Spending time perfecting the story’s important moments is easy to justify. It’s devoting too much time to smaller bits and throwaway gags that can get us into trouble. For example, when Guybrush dives down to the ocean floor in the third episode, we had a perfect opportunity to reference a similar scene in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. Doing so wasn’t necessary for the story, but it made the game a richer experience for Monkey Island fans who would understand the reference.
Later:
Of course we’re going to keep creating the best games we can, but we need to get better about prioritizing and ensuring that any last-minute additions are really important 'need to have' changes as opposed to tweaks that would be nice to have.
For what it's worth, it's the little things like that which make a game special.
Source: Gamasutra
I mean, one of my favourite things in Psychonauts is all the constantly changing messages in the message board. It's totally unnecessary to the game itself but makes it feel so much more alive.
For what it's worth, it's the little things like that which make a game special
I absolutely second that. Absolutely.