(Specifically asking people who made/are-making decently sized indie games)

I’m curious to know, how long did it take you to do pre-production to figure out the story, characters, atmosphere, etc of your games? And how easy was it for you to brainstorm ideas?

I’m asking because I myself am making a full commercial game soon, and pre-production is a bit rough (I only just got done with drafting the story, which turned out pretty well but definitely will be changed a bit), and I am wondering if this is the same for all developers, and how to make the process less tedious.

For all my years of trying to achieved a full game I first imagined it all on my mind with several inspirations. A song, scene, character, phrase, topic, arc, and a vast etc. In all my attempts in canceled projects or text documents, I was never able to put all of the stuff on my mind in action. And to some extent that's fine, the mind concepts is just the very early version of the stuff, but, with all the largue things I imagined, these concepts really aren't nothing since they were never made.

With my hopefully first game looks (looks!) like is gonna be complete, and the pre-production phase was no existing. I just take some ideas and make a first draft whose full story is in 8K words. Then It got expanded, with stuff that I guess was implying in the first draft, and other concepts don't imaginate at all, and now there's 70K currently (I know this is small but the differences between the first draft is clear). Altought I think I capable of give this project a decent end, I was wishing to pull it all in the firsts drafts and not eventually. If this is my first complete story, then is gonna be ironic because of the way I was working in all these years.

If not like I stop kinda pre-producing next games with drafts (text, illustrations) and my mind, I can't stop thinking in the next stories I want to do, even while working in the currently one.

That's basically my experience, sorry if I make it about me. Hope this helps somehow.

Brainstorming ideas is  ridiculously easy . . . it's the deciding which ones to keep and bringing them to life that's the hard part. 

I believe it was a Brackey's (?) video that gave this helpful MoSCoW acronym for categorizing what your game . . .

(M)ust have.

(S)hould have.

(C)ould have.

(W)on't have.

Deciding what ideas fit in which categories will help focus your vision before moving forward.

But to this I would also add, that you should think about the real-world difficulty level of what you want your game to do. For example, in your mind you might envision level 2 being super-awesome with 10,000 objects moving in the background . . . only to find out that the game engine you're using can only support a max of 1,000 before the frame rate drops. It's little realities like that which will often force you to come up with creative solutions or add/remove things entirely. It's a constantly evolving process.  "No plan survives first contact with the enemy."

I don't have pre-production because I start with the real production directly. But, figuring out story, characters and atmosphere has taken about a year (that's how long my whole game to make from first idea to finish). Lots of things fell into place the last day, kind of. Brainstorming ideas is easy: Do it regularly, think like a kid, choose a theme (it's easier to come up with 5 ideas based on "football" than just 5 general ideas), write down everything that feels wrong, ask your friends, don't be a perfectionist, then choose the best of all these dumb ideas... If you want to know any specifics, you can ask me on DM, if that exists on itch.io?. I have so many thoughts and ideas on this that I don't know where to start in this reply...

Even if you write a draft you'll change a lot of things when you see how the things look in real production. So get started with production as soon as possible? Maybe? I don't know, you do it in your own pace.