[bermanoid]

Not at all - the day you went wrong was the day you wrote code that worked and assumed that the people paying you would let you rewrite it later.

That never happens, unless you force the issue by making the first version fundamentally unsalvageable through choice of language or something like that.

If you don't know for sure that you can't (for a very real reason, like the fact that AS3 won't run on iOS) ship a line of code, it's on you to assume that everything you write is going to get to production. That's the reality, even if it's uncomfortable.

...I say as the lead on a game that just got sent in for review today, 8 months early, with 95% of the "prototype" code that we started a few months ago intact. Luckily we never believed that it was actually prototype code, because wasting a month and a half to recreate something that already works is a hard sell to anyone that hasn't struggled with the codebase already.

Pad estimates, and plan for the worst, is all I can suggest. But also realize that sometimes short timelines are a blessing: the people that would be filling up the feature request list stop doing so once you tell them that you're already overcommitted by 80%. That helps the product, usually.

[iMark]

We were asked to produce a prototype in a two month time frame and we did. It was the subsequent unrealistic time frame after we demonstrated the prototype that did the damage.