Yet another meeting about the game project, where we’re told that we need to cut even more time from the project. 80 days of effort are to be cut, to be exact. (We’ve already cut 50 or so.)

This amounts to cutting about 25% of the budget.

The reason it needs to be cut, is that against our best advice, Riddler and Teabag went ahead with the seriously flawed and incomplete budget prepared earlier and proposed it to the client. They said we can do the project for this very definite amount of money in a very specific amount of time. No leeway, no contingency.

The estimate we prepared was surrounded by disclaimers and warnings. Those were ignored.

Now, because of this past communication by Riddler and Teabag, we’re in effect saying to the client, “we’ve really looked at the project now and it’s really going to cost 80 days more”.

Predictably, the client’s response is, “Not our fault. You gave us a specific definitive number and timeline. It’s not our fault you didn’t estimate it and yet committed to it.” Of course, that’s fair.

This is very much an “I told you so” moment, which will be specifically brought up the next time we are asked to do something that stupid again.

Now we are faced with cutting 25% off an already stripped-down version of the project which will leave us with about 2-4 days to start and complete each animation. Normally we’d need about 10-15 days.

This is madness, and Riddler actually seemed to understand that we just can’t cut anything else.

The solution? There is none yet. We left saying there is nothing remaining to cut, and as it stands we’ll be hard-pressed to complete the project anyways.

We’re doubtful how successful this can be given the limited time we have left. We knew it was coming to this.. but damn it’s unfortunate.