Josh Sawyer, director of Pentiment and veteran at Obsidian Entertainment, shares lessons on keeping game development on schedule. His core advice: strictly separate pre-production experimentation from production execution. Experimenting during production is 'extremely risky' and can add six months to a year and a half to a project. He advocates reusing existing solutions, avoiding unnecessary changes, and being conservative about scope creep. He acknowledges that most projects slip three to six months regardless, and that Obsidian's recent release of Avowed, Grounded 2, and The Outer Worlds 2 in the same year strained resources, with the first two missing sales forecasts partly due to inflated budgets from extended development.
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