Hi. Matthew L. Hornbostel here. "Miniature Multiverse" / My Itch page
My personal bits of hard won advice from prior misfires:
-Choose a game engine that is well-developed and actively supported, and ideally cross platform. I made a game with 'Adventure Maker' in '04 and the engine has not been updated since roughly 2007, and games made with it do not run on current Windows systems. I poured so much work into a second project with that same engine only to realize by around 2010 that it'd never work out.
-start relatively small, build up from there. Have something you can point to early on and it'll be a great confidence booster. Feature creep's a real issue for me, and many other devs, and thankfully I got this right with video productions, but sadly not so much with games. Flitting from project to project in a rotation always has been a flaw of mine as well, it is hard not to though when I have so many ideas I think are promising!
-Play to your strengths. I am not a capable programmer but am a good artist. So I make heavy use of my art skills. Often the look of a thing is the selling point initially with my stuff.
-Break all the tasks in your project into organized categories and chunks within a category. Get them done starting with the 'unknowns' - things you aren't sure you know how to do. There should be a handful of these in any project. If you have none, you're not pushing yourself to grow your skill set, but if there are a ton it may be that you're pushing yourself into territory you aren't ready to pursue, and it may become discouraging quickly. For instance, with 'Miniature Multiverse' my first big challenge was capturing first person panoramic views inside a scale miniature, in high resolution,, and setting up a panoramic interface in Unity that was flexible and functional. Often for me it's the interactions and technical stuff that is the unknown factor.
-Keep at it! Don't give up! And...make note of your progress, try to keep things moving forward, and don't be surprised if there's more effort involved than you expected at the outset.