On never finishing your first game

Everyone who has started making games with Unity has the same folder on their disk: unfinished projects. Mine included. For a long time I thought this was a motivation problem. It isn't. The real reason games stay unfinished is scope: starting with a dream too big to ever complete.

Imagination is free; production isn't

First game ideas are always big, because imagining costs nothing. Open world, inventory system, dialogue trees, multiplayer: in your head, all of it gets built in one evening. In production, every mechanic takes weeks; worse, mechanics collide, and each new feature multiplies the maintenance cost of the ones before it. If the gap between the dream and the budget never closes, the project quietly sinks into the folder.

The vertical slice

The concept that helped me most is the vertical slice: finishing a one-minute version of the game end to end. Menu, gameplay, losing, restarting; a small but complete loop. The vertical slice also reveals, at the earliest possible stage, whether the idea is actually fun, before you bury months in a game you don't enjoy.

Cutting is a skill

Deleting a feature feels like loss; it's actually progress. A small finished game teaches incomparably more than a big unfinished one, because finishing forces the lessons no tutorial can teach: shipping, taking feedback from real players, surviving the pain of the last ten percent.

Nobody will remember how small your first game was. You, however, will always remember that you finished it. The second game gets built on top of that confidence.