I've had an epiphany recently on the question I've been unable to solve for as long as I've begun making games after I had finished Jim's Challenge.
If you don't know, and probably 99.999% of you don't, my first ever created game was Jim's Challenge, a sokoban shamelessly ripping off Chip's Challenge that had at least 8 or so levels, a built-in level editor (used to make the levels) and a lack of important things like options, sound, music, etc. You can play it here but it's not that important to the problem I am discussing in this post.
The issue is that after Jim's Challenge I begun searching to make huge titles. You may have seen this before... A big RPG, lovable characters, set in a world not too different from ours, yadda yadda, the creator probably played Undertale and couldn't help imitate it. That was me a good time ago. But even worse, this extended to all sorts of ideas I tried making games out of. Platformers, 3d action adventures, first person shooters, a freaking doom parody.
I had a few emotional breakdowns along the way. I don't consider myself a very sane person, I do things like imitating with my mouth non-existant soundtracks in the shower, pretend i'm streaming (unless I am streaming) when i'm bored, that kind of thing. And this was how I responded to coming onto the conclusion these were wastes of times, I beat myself up tremendously only to come to the same situation again.
Unfortunately this continued happening even when I knew the scope of the project was small. Even when I did something like remaking Jim's Challenge, I came onto these walls I could never manage to climb. I never understood why, even after I had learned so much. Why, even with being limited, I can't finish even a little pong game? Am I unfit for this? Should I never have seeked doing game development in the first place?
Come this year, something changed. For the first time ever, I had managed to make 2 games in barely days succession. How?! In spite of all that trouble I had over the years, how did I just simply make some games, release them, without going through the horrors of before? I learned about execution.
It is easy to say "I want to make a RPG" but it is hard to make one, this is pretty understood knowledge. The issue is, even if you know how hard it is to make one, and possess skills to do it, you can never hope to do so when you focus on what matters the least to progressing it. This is called the Law of triviality.
What I never learned to do until now was to put focus on what allows me to build more of the game, instead of, say, spending 4 hours on planning out how this one specific mechanic of the game can work. Those 4 hours could've been spent programming that mechanic playing out, maybe even with more depth than the thinking could've imagined doing since you were actually going at it.
This is why I dread going on thinking tangents about what to do next nowadays. I think about minor details of little worth a lot and waste time using that thinking that could've gone to power the actual practice. Reducing scope will not help if the execution doesn't earn enough worth.
Thus this is how I managed to have created Ratatan (and the better definitive version) within such short time. I dedicated the time towards the game for execution, and the limitation became the proper frame where I built things I wanted it to be. Weird building analogies aside, I understand how some of you already know to this. You can also say "well planning things is important" and that's fine too, it's what I had actually done when developing the latest update for Ratatan X.
What makes me different from the past me however is that I went ahead and did it, focusing on getting the important things done and freeing up time and power to do things I didn't think of too. Doing small projects is gold, but it's merely a fool's without understanding what helps you do it.
