How to Decide What to Build Next

Deciding what to build next—after finishing a game, or when starting out—is a consequential choice that shapes years of your life, and it's easy to choose badly: chasing trends, leaping to your most ambitious dream, or picking something you can't finish or aren't excited about. The best next project balances excitement, achievability, and building on what you've established, and weighing these deliberately leads to better choices than following any single impulse.

Excitement, achievability, and momentum

Three factors should weigh on the choice of what to build next, and over-indexing on any one leads astray. Excitement matters because you'll spend a long time on this project, and a game you're not genuinely excited to make is one you'll struggle to sustain motivation for through the inevitable hard middle—but excitement alone, untempered by achievability, leads to the overambitious dream projects that never finish. Achievability matters because a project you can't realistically finish, however exciting, becomes another abandoned game that teaches less than a completed one—but achievability alone, untempered by excitement, leads to safe, boring projects you don't care about and won't push to excellence. Building on what you've learned or established matters because it creates momentum—a next project that leverages your existing skills, audience, or established strengths builds on what you have rather than starting from scratch—but chasing only what's strategic, ignoring excitement and your own growth, can lead to uninspired choices. The best next project balances all three: something you're genuinely excited to make, that you can realistically finish given your skills and resources, and that builds on what you've established or learned, creating momentum rather than starting over. Weighing these together, rather than following the single impulse of your most ambitious dream or the latest trend or the safest bet, leads to a next project that's both motivating and completable and that advances your trajectory.

Resisting the pulls of trend-chasing and dream-leaping is what keeps the choice grounded in what actually serves you. Two impulses particularly distort the choice of what to build next. Trend-chasing—building whatever genre or style is hot right now, hoping to ride a wave—is tempting but dangerous, because trends shift over the long development time, because you're competing with everyone else chasing the same trend, and because a game built to chase a trend rather than from genuine interest often lacks the soul and motivation that excitement provides. The other impulse is leaping to your most ambitious dream project—the huge, complex game you've always wanted to make—which over-indexes on excitement at the expense of achievability and usually leads to an overscoped project that collapses or consumes years it shouldn't. Both impulses ignore the balance that leads to good choices: trend-chasing sacrifices excitement and genuine interest for perceived opportunity, while dream-leaping sacrifices achievability for ambition. The grounded approach is to weigh excitement, achievability, and momentum together—choosing a next project you genuinely care about, can realistically finish, and that builds on what you've established—rather than following either the trend or the dream. This often means a project more modest than your ultimate ambitions but more exciting than a purely strategic choice, one that you'll finish and that moves you forward, building the skills, audience, and body of work that eventually make the bigger dreams achievable. Deciding what to build next deliberately, balancing the factors that matter rather than following a single distorting impulse, is what leads to a sustainable trajectory of finished, motivating projects that build on each other, rather than a series of abandoned trend-chases or overscoped dreams. The best next project is the one that's exciting enough to sustain you, achievable enough to finish, and strategic enough to build momentum—and finding that balance is the skill of choosing well.

Small and finished beats big and abandoned

A folder of impressive unfinished projects teaches far less than a single small finished one, because finishing is where the hardest and most valuable lessons live — the unglamorous final stretch of bug-fixing, polishing, and shipping that ambitious abandoned projects never reach. Each completed game, however modest, builds the finishing muscle and the confidence that make the next one achievable.

So resist the pull of the dream project until you've shipped a few small ones. Scope to what you can actually complete, finish it, and let the experience of shipping make your bigger ambitions realistic.

Trust behaviour over opinions

People are unreliable narrators of their own experience — they're polite, they rationalise, they suggest fixes that miss the real problem. What they do tells the truth that what they say obscures: where they hesitate, where they get stuck, what they ignore, where they quit. The most valuable feedback is usually the behaviour you observe, not the opinion you're offered.

This is why watching beats asking, and why real data about what players actually do beats any amount of speculation. When several people stumble at the same spot, that's a problem worth fixing, regardless of whether any of them mentioned it.

Why finishing beats perfecting

The hardest skill in indie development isn't any particular technique — it's finishing. Most games that never ship didn't fail on talent; they failed on scope, polished forever, or chased one more feature. The developers who build a real body of work are almost always the ones who got good at choosing something small enough to complete and then completing it.

That's worth keeping in mind here, because it's easy to let any one part of development expand to fill all your time. Decide what 'good enough to ship' looks like, protect that line, and treat the endless list of possible improvements as a backlog rather than a set of obligations.

Plan for the parts you can't see

Once a game leaves your machine, a lot of what happens to it becomes invisible by default. Players run it on hardware you don't own, hit problems you never reproduced, and most of them never tell you — they simply move on. The gap between 'it works for me' and 'it works for everyone' is where a surprising amount of churn quietly lives.

So plan to see what you otherwise couldn't. Watching real players, capturing the bugs and crashes they hit with the context to fix them, and paying attention to where they drop off all turn invisible problems into ones you can actually act on — which protects the reviews and retention everything else depends on.

Consistency beats intensity

Indie development is a long game, and it rewards steady, sustainable effort more than heroic bursts. A little progress made consistently — on the game, on the marketing, on the community — compounds in a way that last-minute sprints never do. The developers who finish and find an audience are usually the ones who kept showing up, not the ones who worked themselves into the ground for a week and then burned out.

Build a pace you can sustain, and protect it. Momentum is fragile and expensive to rebuild, so steady forward motion is worth more than any single intense push.

The best next project balances excitement, achievability, and building on what you've established. Resist both trend-chasing and leaping to your most ambitious dream.