Mastering Indian Game Development: How to Scope Your First Indie Project for Success

About 1,500 games are released on Steam every month, while an even greater volume debuts on the Google Play Store during the same period.  This means your chances of making a commercially successful game have significantly come down due to the low visibility/discoverability that your game can get on the platforms. Statistically speaking an overwhelming number of games are commercial flops. Upon deeper inspection, it is clear that shovelware makes up for a major chunk of these failures. Some of them are low-effort cash grabs, some are low-budget hobby projects and others are poorly conceptualized and executed games. 

Gone are the days when releasing a game was a badge of honor and proof of skill/success. The games you ship need to succeed in some measure to prove your mettle. But success is mostly relative. For some it is a  ‘x’ percentage in profit, for others, they are okay with just breaking even or not even recouping the investment as long as their games get good reviews/word of mouth as they are building credibility. To look at it the other way, the quality of a game is the most important signifier of potential commercial success. You may have all the marketing budget in the world but a bad game isn’t going to succeed on the strength of its marketing. 

So how do you aim and achieve quality? Especially with your first game in today’s saturated and competitive? The answer lies in “scope” Think of scope as a tool of focus. It forces you to focus on the most important things and suck the most mileage out of it.  Thus, this article will dive deeply into the do’s and don’ts of scoping for your first project.