When Your ‘Small Game’ Turns Into an Unfinishable Monster
Scope creep and procrastination. The two silent blockers that can end your solo dev journey before it begins
Hey fellow game makers!
It’s a new gamedev day for you. Coffee’s hot, Godot is open, and today’s the day you finally make progress. As soon as you look at your “work in progress” game your mind starts firing off new ideas, it could be mechanics, skills for your character, or procedural map generation.
Sure, that burst of creativity feels good. But in reality, you’re mixing all the ingredients for something far less exciting: the perfect recipe for stalling your project.
I used to think this only happened when I lacked motivation1. But over time, I realized the real culprit was starting without a clear plan.
I’m about to introduce you to a few concepts that, instead of working against us, can actually become our greatest allies
Let’s Defeat Procrastination
We are on a gamedev newsletter but procrastination could be applied to every aspect of our lives.
Procrastination is the act of unnecessarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there could be negative consequences for doing so. It is a common human experience involving delays in everyday chores or even putting off tasks such as attending an appointment, submitting a job report or academic assignment, or broaching a stressful issue with a partner.
Generally speaking, procrastination starts with the unknown of a process or task, it can be also triggered as a response to negative emotions on taking a specific task, which is not our case — we love gamedev right?
Let’s shed some light to end with this mini-boss, we just need Planning.
Yes, that’s it. Probably you are a full time worker, your time is precious and limited, but we can prioritize and find slots for gamedev — do the exercise of look at your Weekly Calendar and book at least 4 hours during the week to make progress. Why 4 hours? I will explain that shortly.
Let’s Defeat Scope Creep
Definition first 😊
Scope creep refers to the uncontrolled expansion of a project's initial goals and requirements, leading to increased costs, delayed timelines, and potential project failure. It happens when new features, tasks, or deliverables are added to a project without proper evaluation, authorization, or consideration of the impact on the overall project plan.
This is a tough one as our creativity boost usually comes with new ideas, fresh approach and let’s be honest, we all think our ideas are unique and they could be a revolution on the videogame industry, sadly, far away from reality.
MVP is our goal, PoC is our loop - Our allies
The reason you want to create a minimum viable product as quickly as possible is so that you can do some minimum viable playtesting as quickly as possible. Proof of concepts (PoC) are linked to mechanics or features you need to test and implement as part of your MVP goal
Ask the following questions to define your first MVP:
What do I want my players to feel? Example: Tactical thinking on a Bomberman game
What is the goal of the game? Example: End with all enemies of each run at binding of isaac
What is the hook of my game? Example: Jump mechanic in Super Mario games
So with those questions we are defining the shape of our game, but we can also come with a really ambitious idea like the new Skyrim developed on Unity.
Do you remember when I said we should look for 4 hours weekly? Let’s break this down.
Our MVP should not take more than 4-6 weeks to be developed
Taking into consideration we are going to spent around 4 hours per week and that’s going to be around 24 hours in total, that should be more than enough for your first MVP to be shared with family and friends.
We have now the boundaries, our game should not have any final aesthetics (use placeholders) and should be playable until the goal is accomplished. Now is your turn to create a realistic plan with a breakdown of milestones to reach your MVP.
Tools like trello could help creating cards with the list of milestones to be accomplished.
See you on the next level
Scope creep and procrastination may always hover around, but with clear planning, commitment, and an MVP in sight, we can turn them from enemies into allies. Now it’s your turn — open your project, take the smallest step forward, and see where it takes you.
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Thanks for playing!
In game dev and in life, motivation’s not the spawn point — it’s the power-up you collect after you start playing