To wait or not to wait

One major drawback to using a third party engine such as Unity3D is that the developers are always teasing you with the promise of future features and upgrades.

There you are, at the beginning of the long road to creating a game.  You plan out your game, start developing it, and then they drop a blog-shell – a blog post talking about all these shiny new features they are going to implement real soon... honest!  So you’re left asking yourself the question:  do you develop with what you have available now, or do you put parts of development onto the back burner in the hopes that the features will come along in a timely fashion?

Part of you really wants to wait for the new stuff – partly because it would make for a better player experience, but mostly because the promised features usually involve more efficient ways of working, which can save you heaps of time.

At first the answer seems like an obvious yes – wait for the new stuff and make a better game in less time.  The problem is the Unity engine is constantly evolving, and improving.  As soon as you get comfortable with one feature set, they promise more, shinier features in an upcoming release.  You end up stuck in a perpetual state of learning new features and systems, only to be trumped by the next promised bounty.

At some point you just have to say to hell with it, and start developing to a specific version of the Unity engine, and try your best not to read the Unity blog.