Week 12: Synthesis

The closing lecture — why cutting for focus is a defensible design decision and cutting for time isn't

10 May 2027

Every studio session this semester ended with something new to press. This one doesn’t, and that absence is deliberate: the skill being tested now is scope, not addition. Twelve weeks of vocabulary is more than any single game needs, and knowing that — rather than trying to prove otherwise — is what separates a finished game from an inventory of mechanics.

There’s a difference worth drawing between cutting something because you ran out of time and cutting it because it didn’t serve the game. Both leave the same gap in the final build, but only one of them is a decision anyone else can learn from. The design note this week asks for is evidence of the second kind: not just what got left out, but why leaving it out made the game better, specifically — a harder claim to support than “there wasn’t time.”

Outline#

• why the final week adds no mechanic, and what skill that absence is actually testing
• cutting for focus versus cutting for time: the same gap in the build, but only one is a defensible decision
• what a scope decision has to say to count as deliberate, not merely convenient