Doing a rough pass (complete the game before fine tuning everything ) then dressing it up later is genius! It’s kinda what I’m doing with my project. I feel more indies would complete there games if we all did this.
A couple things to be careful of if you take this approach
- It needs to go hand-in-hand with an iterative process. I usually don't start roughing out other levels until I've got a pretty complete vertical-slice of at least one level.
- Make sure you have your basic mechanics down or else you might find yourself having to redo a lot of levels over again.
Usually for me, how it goes is more or less:
-Figure out the basic mechanics
-Prototype those mechanics in conjunction with making a test level
-Flesh out that test level into a fully fledged level while continuing to tweak the mechanics
-Create a lot of non-level content like enemies and obstacles
-Rough out a bunch of other levels, while also revisiting, tweaking and revising the mechanics as needed, as well as adding more enemies and stuff
-Polish some of those levels so I get a feel for how they'll ultimately wind up
-Rough out the rest of the levels
-Polish
I sometimes get ahead of myself (as evidenced by the fact that I didn't have falling damage in the game until after I had already blocked out all of the levels) but this is how I generally try to manage my projects.