First - I’m a one-man band, who’s made a grand total of about $25 off of my games. My current project is the first one I’m planning to actually sell, and not just offer freely on free game portals (though, I’ll do that too after the initial spike falls off.)
I look to my competition not to shape what I do, but more what I build. My competitors - including you…in fact, probably especially you, @ * - are very bright peole who in most instances have done this A) longer, and B) most likely a lot better, than anything I’ve yet done. Directly competing, as a one-man band, who cannot yet put a full eight hours per day into a games project, is a laughable concept. Increasing the amount of time I put into my current project - as suggested after my last one - has helped a lot with everything, but that’s not the point.
Instead, I play other people’s games, and learn. If Game A has a neat way of approaching NPC sociology, I take note. If Game B has a cool boss fight, I take note. If Game C has a cool quest sequence, I take note. Pretty much, my competition isn’t there to ‘fight against’; instead, you’re all the subject of my research!**
As far as time goes, as much as I like @Gigiwoo 's 12-week view of game development, I think there’s situations where it doesn’t hold up. Some experiences - like a RPG, regardless of hemisphere - could be done in 12 weeks, if and only if you’ve got a darn good pipeline for creating content. However, the penalties of a project taking too long are a reality too; one figure I’ve heard from my bosses at the day job said that a project begins drastically increasing it’s chances of failure after nine months have passed. That might just be business software - which, is the day job - but it makes sense for games too. Of course, your game could ‘work’ with a longer dev scale.
Also on the subject of time - my last project turned out to be my best one yet, because I budgeted time for bugfixes, which led to a slight uptick in my game’s user ratings (I think something like +1.5-3.0%, but my design had problems to start with.) Had I scheduled time to properly polish the game, it would likely have helped still more.*** I’ve already scheduled about a month for nothing but hammering on the game, and I’m planning a polish phase of whatever half of my main dev phase turns out to be, because I really need to spend the time to make my game great.
On scalability and productivity, I think that - and, I’m putting on my Captain Obvious hat here**** - that a bigger game more often than not is harder to be productive on, because the same amount of work achieves ‘less’ against the project. More simply, you could say that a project has ‘weight’ as a function of its size. This weight can help the momentum, from an emotional perspective (‘holy crap I’m building a big JRPG!*****’), but it also makes initial work harder to pull off.
That’s why I’m working on what I’d call a ‘JRPG short’, with not much more than 3 hours of ‘core’ gameplay required to finish the main questline, but a small amount of optional quests that can be pursued to alter that play time (I want my shortest path for the speed runners to be about a 45:00 path, actually, and that involves getting the speedrunner reward weapon in the final dungeon, which becomes inaccessible after 1:30:00 of play time.) Content sucks, and I have less experience at making it; so, I’ve been spending time developing a campaign that requires less explicit content and leaves more to the player’s desire to explore.
I think to make something that is actually good, that I can make a real financial return on invested time with, and that leaves me feeling good about the project, going nuts with a AAA-length epic is the wrong approach…period. I see the AAA industry ailing under its own weight; the reason AAA games are becoming less relevant isn’t because smartphone gaming ‘is better’; it’s got a different objective. AAA games aren’t becoming less relevent because ‘indie games are better’; for every successful indie game that is unique, artful, and ultimately lucky, there’s 1000 others that horribly fail, indie games don’t displace AAA. Instead, what’s hurting AAA games the most is they’re trying to be too much, and, they’re failing at it.
As an indie - whether in my current one-man-band state, or if I eventually join up with a studio - I don’t want to be what I see AAA currently being. I see a small scope that provides interesting options to the player being the profitable, doable, and sustainable path forward.
As a result, I feel that if you feel yourself choking under the weight of your project, like I did the side-scrolling version of Sara the Shieldmage, it’s time to pull out the machete. If the machete would turn your game into stew meat, there are other genres to explore, other paths in the maze of making your next project.
Finally, I don’t think it bad that you’ve acknowledged how many concepts you’ve killed. Every concept I killed gave me some piece of what made my last project, and what’s making my current project, be it knowledge of something not to do, or a cool component. Every killed concept drives me harder to finish something. In fact, Sara the Shieldmage is the first project that under normal circumstances I would have just ‘killed’, but instead I redirected it, and it seems to be taking, for the time being. We’ll find out when I post my ‘Nuuria Continent’****** prototype, which should hopefully be within the month.
*: Grr! (Not really. You’re pretty cool.)
**: Muahaha.
***: Had I properly designed it in the first place, though, I might not care.
****: It’s actually Master Chief Sergeant Obvious.
*****: I’m not making a big JRPG, I value finishing things.
******: I will not stop plugging Sara the Shieldmage. It will be awesome.
