Making games is not easy. Let me tell you, every little tweak and touch takes up a tremendous amount of time. That little scoring tweak that you'd like to get in will take a MINIMUM of one to three days of programmer time. More moderate sized stuff may take two weeks. If you're unlucky, and anything termed a "rewrite" is required, it may take months. And don't get me started on artist time.

For example, we decided we wanted to try some more variants of the singing HUD, so we implemented four of them to put in front of the team and vote on a favorite. These weren't fully polished displays or anything, just a quickly hacked together demonstrations of the concepts. That whole process took about three weeks of an artist's time and three weeks of a programmer's time, for a total of a month and a half of development time. That's a lot of effort from two departments, and a mossillion dollars from our budget. (A mossillion is the amount required to keep Matt Moss from stoning us for our indecisiveness).

That doesn't mean you can't do anything, however. If you're clever, you can use tricks to make this workload less. For example, we use a lot of camera transitions to mask moments and changes that don't quite line up. You might in one shot have the guitarist and the singer in their normal positions, then in the next one they're leaning in and singing together. How did they walk to those spots? They didn't. But by being a little looser about positioning (like most movies are) we can create more interesting shots, and have the time to make a lot more of them than we otherwise could. The point is maximum awesomeness, not maximum consistency.

When it comes down to it, making a game isn't about coming up with great ideas; It's about juggling which ideas you have time to make. There may be 1,000 great things you may really want to do with a game, but ultimately you may only be able to implement 100 of them. You might even have 50 or so perfect, super-cheap, easy win ideas that could really add to the game, but if you implemented them all you'd never actually get the game into people's hands.

Long story short: We love the ideas that you guys post. They're insightful, they're inspirational, and they help us to know what you guys are thinking about and what you'd like to see improved. But don't feel bad if your idea isn't used directly. Chances are, your mossillion dollar idea is sitting in a queue with a hundred other wonderfully great ideas, just waiting for the developer time to free up.