Step 1) Be realistic:

Step 1) Be realistic:
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When it comes to making games, starting with a game design beyond the scope of what your team can reasonably accomplish is one of the best ways to make sure your project fails. On the other had, starting with a reasonable design is one of the best ways to make sure your project succeeds.

This is one of the areas that Indie developers struggle with most. You need to realize up-front that, unless you're working with a team of a hundred people, and have a ten million dollar budget, you will not be able to create Half-Life 2, or any game of similar scale.

Of course, no one is stopping you from trying to do so, and we'll wish you good luck in all your endeavors. Trying to create the game of your dreams, or even a small part of it, can be lots of fun.

This guide, however, offers advice on how to make a profitable game, with a small team. If you're an Indie-- and you want to be successful-- you need to come up with an Indie game design.

Realize that game development is hard and takes a long time-
It took Dynamix 2 years to make Tribes 2, with a team of over 30 experienced game professionals and a large budget. Doom 3 and Half-life 2 spent six years in development, with even larger teams and budgets.
Creating a commercially successful game is no easy task-- no matter what technology or engine you're using.
The fact that you are using a mature platform like Torque for your core technology will definitely save you time over other game developers who have to create their engine and tools. That is an advantage of using Torque, but no engine is magical. You still have to be realistic. Come up with a game design that works on your scale. You can do fun, exciting games without getting into a frivolous feature or scope contest with games from huge developers.
Even larger teams with funding need to be careful about their game designs. The tighter and funner you can make your game, the better it will be. A recurring theme you'll see throughout this guide is that gameplay should dictate features, not the other way around.
A game feature should only make it into your game because it makes the game much more fun. Otherwise, you end up with features which may actually hurt your core gameplay, and which exist solely to fill an extra bullet point in marketing materials. The war for feature-count is pointless and silly-- smart game designers avoid it.
Be creative!
Being realistic doesn't mean you can't be creative. In fact, the opposite is required: a creative game design will let you compete with games from big developers, even if your feature set isn't as large. Just because the scale of your game design has to match your resources doesn't mean you are stuck doing a chintzy game. This is one of the areas where Indie developers have a huge advantage in the competitive marketplace!
The fact that you are on your own means you can think of and go with designs that large publishers and developers wouldn't. You can be original, you can be wacky, you can make your game fun.
Just make sure the scale of the design matches what you can realistically get done.

In the real world:

Here at GarageGames, we set out to build Marble Blast in 2002. Marble Blast started from the get-go with what we thought was a very reasonable game design-- a fast, fun, simple marble racing game.

However, even with our reasonable initial concept, it was hard to resist the temptation of growing the scope of the project as we started fleshing out the design. You'll see some of the ways this manifested itself, and how we dealt with it, as you continue with this chapter.

Figure 2.2. Marble Blast - Final Build

Even with a relatively simple game design in mind, it's a long road to producing a fun game.

Suffice it to say, it is rare indeed to come up with a detailed initial game design that will work perfectly on the first try. You're going to have to iterate your design-- see what works, and what doesn't. The point is, starting with a realistic, achievable game design in the first place yields an advantage over most game projects, which try to do way too much from the start, and consequently have to spend even longer pruning and refining gameplay features.