Defining Polish In One Sentence

At a forum I frequent, one of the posters was asking people for their definition of what “polish” really meant. He was, of course, looking for something a little more philosophical, I suspect, than my one-liner:

“Fixing All Your ‘C’ Bugs”

 I was being cheeky, but the truth is, those “C Bugs” are a really great metric for how polished your game is.   If your QA department is worth its salt, those testers are going to be actively trying to bury you in bugs, and the quickest way to numerically overwhelm a dev team with bugs is by enumerating all the C’s.  

It’s hard to reproduce a lot of crashes, and gameplay B’s that aren’t showstoppers require a lot of research, but an exhaustive inventory of all the rough edges, typos, UI inconsistencies, graphics errors, poorly designed scenarios/levels and inaccuracies?  That’s money in the bank

Depending on the kind of game you’re making, it might be a lot more difficult for testers to point to obvious design issues that reflect on the polish of the game, but hopefully your designers are playing the game enough and being objective and critical enough to know before anyone else when the game isn’t a very polished experience.   

It’s easy for a developer to develop a blind spot for all those “little things” like your terrible tutorial (you’re an expert, so you never use it anyway), spelling errors (after a while, you don’t even notice them), graphical errors (a little clipping never hurt anyone!)… but testers, you can’t pay them to turn a blind eye to that stuff.  

So the next time you fire up your bug database and look at your bugs, try mentally substituting the word “polish” for “C”, and ask yourself if you can afford *not* to tackle them!