Don’t get me wrong. Our design runs to several hundred pages - we don't pull the game out of thin air. Most of the features are described down to the minutest detail. Only then a situation come along where you are desperately trying to write the last few missing, but quite important features for the programmers, the designers meanwhile are working on lacking craft mechanisms and in the middle of it all ten new graphic and concept designers are asking for assignments. But to assign work to the graphic guys, you first have to read and comment the crafting design from the designers, which after two weeks of work by six people “surprisingly” runs to a hundred pages, and that you cannot read in five minutes.
So you make an agreement with the graphic artists that instead of creating assets for minigames they should first design situation plans and white boxes of the villages on the map and then start on the crafting next week after you've done your review. During the course of the revision, however, you discover that some of the designers haven’t quite gotten the idea of how the crafting should look, that two very similar activities from two different designers have completely different controls, and you will have to go over it with them, redo it and add some stuff that you didn't think of when conceiving the crafting, but turn out to be quite fundamental obstacles to its functionality.
So in the end it turns out that the graphic guys have to wait a week longer and the designing of features and handling the backlog will have to wait, too. The Boulder of Sisyphus has rolled back a bit. And then when you've finished all the crafting and show it to the programmers, they throw their hands up and tell you it can’t be done like that and they’re not going to waste two months of work on some nonsense like cooking and we should go and simplify it. So the graphic designers...
