By Nathan Fouts, President of Mommy’s Best Games, Inc. Check out our dev log.

Probably the biggest hurdle in indie game development isn’t coding the best pixel shader, or the most perceptive artificial intelligence, or the smoothest animation—it’s actually completing the entire game that’s the trouble.

You may be thinking “of course that’s the hard part—that’s what I’m working on!” Well, yes, and no. Without sounding too philosophical, you’re working on the *new* version of your game, not the one you started with originally.

That’s a good thing! The game design has to evolve over time, allowing for constructive criticism from friends, family, and fans, but the problem is you have to actually wrap it up at some point. Too much “feature creep” can bloat your game project and make it feel impossible to complete.

I’ve seen, played, and read about too many indie projects that started out fun-sounding and reasonable, but then quickly expanded into the most expansive, most enthralling, realistic, all-encompassing, RTSMMORPGFPS puzzle-fighter the world has ever known. Obviously those projects have stalled. And it’s not just a matter of hyperbolic situations of including too many genres, I know of many games that just have too much designed, even though they’re not huge games, than the developer can ever finish.

I think a lot of indie developers think “I have to make my first game *perfect* or no one will want to play my future games!” The sad reality is that’s true. If you release something that’s not perfect, no one will ever, ever, ever, want to play anything you make and your name will be permanently besmirched.

For Arrested Development fans out there—

Of course that’s not true--if your game is terrible or just mediocre most likely everyone will simply ignore it. When you do make something awesome, they’ll forget about your early stuff (if they ever knew) and still praise you. Look at Jonathan Blow’s home page here. I had no idea he posted those game prototypes so long ago (though they do sound neat). And yet, you, me, and everyone else knows about Braid!

Now you may be thinking “But I don’t want to compromise my artistic integrity”. That’s awesome; you probably don’t need my advice, and will do perfectly fine spending 5 years on your Cave Story. But before ‘Pixel’ made Cave Story he made “Squid Kid”. Not as well-known, and yet he cut his teeth on it, and invariably learned a lot to prepare for CS.

The knowledge and experience gained in every aspect of game development and marketing from actually finishing a game is enormous. Especially if you’re a one or two person group, after you’ve had to create menus, UI, level serialization, character animation, mouse handling, game press contacting, AI writing, screenshot taking, and trailer making, you will literally have transformed into different people from those who that started the project.

Finishing Weapon of Choice was a colossal amount of work. But it’s done, and now I’m working on two new games at once. How it is that possible? The key is scope. As you can read here, I cut a lot of things to finish Weapon of Choice. Was that the right thing to do? Could it have been better? It can always be better, but the important part is, it got finished, it exists, and people are playing it. It’s no longer just in my head, stuck on my computer.

Here in Shoot 1UP the player is controlling 11 ships simultaneously against the ‘Turret Carousels’.

As for my two current games, Shoot 1UP has an extremely focused design: A manic shoot ‘em up in which each 1UP collected instantly becomes a playable ship, allowing you to build entire armada. Short yet sweet, it will be completed by end of this January. Grapple Buggy is a bigger game, but it’s still within reason. I’ve designed what’s needed, adding precious little more, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Plan out your game within reason, and then see it through. Be ruthless about what needs to be in the game. Be ready to cut things from the design. And if you have to cut things, realize this—NO ONE KNOWS YOU CUT IT. Unless you tell them of course, but that’s the trick! Don’t tell them about the RPG-wielding robo-badger in level 3, and they’ll never know what they missed (And when you put it in your next game or deliver an update for the first one, they’ll still love it!) Finish a small game first, and you’ll learn volumes.