Scope an indie game around the experience players should have, then make every production decision answerable to that promise. Start by testing the uncertain fun with the cheapest playable prototype; use a small vertical slice only when you need evidence that the team can deliver representative work at the intended quality. Revisit the plan as evidence arrives, and explicitly retain, reduce, defer, or cut work instead of letting the project expand by default.
What game are you promising to make?
Before listing features, describe the game in one or two sentences: what the player does and what makes doing it distinctive. This is a planning tool, not a standardized industry formula. Its purpose is to give the team a reference point when new ideas, production problems, and appealing possibilities compete for limited capacity.
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A useful promise is player-facing and concrete enough to guide choices. “A game with crafting, exploration, and dialogue” names systems, but does not yet explain what experience those systems create. Try describing the player’s actions and the intended feeling or tension: for example, a game about navigating a tiny wilderness by choosing which landmarks to investigate, where wandering itself is the reward. That example is illustrative, not a prescription for a particular genre or design.
Keep the promise narrow enough that you can use it in production conversations. If it could describe hundreds of unrelated games, sharpen it. If it depends on a feature list, rewrite it in terms of what the player experiences. The promise should not become a contract to deliver every early idea; it is a way to tell which ideas are carrying the game’s identity.
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Separate the promise from its current implementation
A core experience can often be expressed through more than one mechanic, presentation choice, or content plan. If a planned system proves too expensive, ask what player-facing job it was meant to do. Perhaps it creates discovery, meaningful choice, tension, or a sense of place. A simpler system may preserve that job even if it looks different from the first design.
This distinction protects the idea without protecting every implementation. Treat the player-facing experience as the thing to defend; treat individual features as proposals that must continue to earn their production cost.
Why scope needs to change during development
A scope document is a snapshot of current intentions, not evidence that the work will fit. The Game Developers Conference (GDC) session listing for Blazej Zywiczynski’s 2022 talk, “Fear of Scope: The #1 Reason We Make Ludicrous Production Decisions,” describes scope growing during development and necessary cuts being delayed. That pattern matters because unmade decisions do not make work disappear: they leave teams trying to deliver an expanding plan without resolving what no longer fits.
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The answer is not to freeze the first feature list or to cut impulsively whenever work becomes difficult. It is to make the project’s assumptions visible and revisit them as the team learns more. A prototype may show that the central activity is less engaging than expected. Production work may reveal that a supposedly small feature depends on several systems. A slice may show that the target quality takes more effort than the plan assumed. Each is new evidence; the scope decision should respond to it.
No universal review cadence is established by the available GDC session description. Choose a regular point to discuss scope that fits how the team works, and also reopen the conversation when significant evidence changes the plan. The important thing is not a particular weekly or monthly schedule; it is that reassessment happens before deferred decisions become last-minute delivery problems.
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Prototype first when the uncertain question is whether the play works
Build the cheapest playable version that can answer whether the central activity is engaging. A prototype is an experiment, not a miniature finished game. Its job is to reduce a specific design uncertainty at low cost. It can use temporary art, simple interface elements, placeholder sound, and incomplete content if those omissions do not prevent you from judging the play question.
Write the question before building
State what the prototype should help you decide. “Can a player make an interesting choice between these two routes?” is more useful than “make the exploration system.” A focused question helps keep the experiment small. It also gives you a basis for deciding what to observe: whether players understand the choice, whether the consequences matter to them, or whether the activity creates the intended tension.
Do not add polish merely because the rough version feels embarrassing to show. If presentation is not affecting the question you need answered, polish consumes time without improving the experiment. If a particular visual, audio, or control detail is essential to the experience you are testing, include the minimum needed to make that detail legible. The goal is not roughness for its own sake; it is using only the work needed to learn.
Decide what the result changes
Before making the prototype, identify the kinds of decision its result could support. You might keep the mechanic, change its rules, test a different implementation, or reconsider whether it belongs in the game. If every possible outcome leads to the same production plan, the experiment may not be answering a decision-relevant question.
A prototype can provide evidence about whether the central play is compelling. It does not, by itself, prove that the team can produce a larger game at its intended quality. That is a different question, and one reason to consider a vertical slice only when production feasibility or quality remains uncertain.
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Use a vertical slice to test production feasibility
A vertical slice is a small, representative segment built across the relevant disciplines. Unlike a rough prototype, it aims to show what the game’s work looks like at the intended quality and how the pieces fit together. It can expose the real effort, quality bar, dependencies, and bottlenecks before the team expands production.
Use one when you have a meaningful uncertainty about whether the team can make representative work—not simply because a slice sounds like a required milestone. It costs real production effort. For a tiny or experimental project, or when feasibility is already clear, that cost may outweigh what the slice can teach. Keep it small enough to test the risk rather than quietly turning it into a large chunk of the finished game.
Prototype and vertical slice answer different questions
| Approach | Main question | What to build | What it can tell you | When it may be unnecessary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rough prototype | Is the central play engaging? | The cheapest playable version that lets you test the uncertain activity; it need not look like the finished game. | Whether the core interaction or decision is worth developing, and what design change may be needed. | When the play question is already sufficiently clear—but do not mistake that for proof that full production is feasible. |
| Vertical slice | Can the team produce representative work at the intended quality? | A small segment spanning the disciplines and dependencies that matter to the production risk. | The work, quality bar, production effort, and bottlenecks involved in making that kind of game content. | When the project is very small or experimental, or feasibility is already clear enough that a slice would add little. |
These are different tools, not competing labels for the same milestone. A project can need one, both at different points, or a lighter approach. Select the tool based on the uncertainty that could most undermine the plan.
Compare candidate features by what they contribute and what they cost
When an idea enters the plan, discuss it against the same practical questions. This is a decision checklist synthesized from production guidance, not a validated scorecard. It is more useful to expose trade-offs than to assign invented numerical weights that suggest a level of precision the team does not have.
- Fit to the promise: Does this feature express the distinctive player experience, enable it, or make it easier to understand?
- Uncertainty reduced: Does building it test an important unknown, or is it being added before the team knows whether it matters?
- Production effort: What work does the feature appear to require across the team’s relevant disciplines? State assumptions and unknowns instead of disguising guesses as estimates.
- Dependencies: What other systems, content, tools, or decisions must exist first? A feature that looks small in isolation may block or expand other work.
- Deferrability: Can it wait without breaking the core experience or making future work harder? If so, deferral may preserve capacity while leaving the option open.
Use the answers to discuss alternatives, not just to defend or reject a feature. A feature might be central but too costly in its current form; reduce it to the smallest version that still delivers its player-facing job. Another might be attractive but resolve no important uncertainty; defer it until there is evidence that it belongs. A third might be valuable only if a dependency is built first; make that dependency visible before promising delivery.
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Distinguish core work, enabling work, experiments, and optional work
A practical conversation can sort proposed work by role. Core work directly expresses the promise. Enabling work makes that experience possible or understandable. Experiments are intentionally limited efforts to answer consequential unknowns. Optional work may enrich the game but can wait without undermining its identity. These categories are a way to reason about the plan, not a universal classification system.
Be alert to features that claim to be “core” only because they are already on the list. Ask what players would lose if the feature disappeared, and whether a cheaper alternative could preserve that experience. Conversely, do not label a feature optional merely because it is technically difficult: if it carries the game’s distinctiveness, the team may need to find a smaller implementation rather than remove its function outright.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Make scope decisions explicit: retain, reduce, defer, or cut
At each scope review, compare remaining work with actual progress and what prototypes or production attempts have taught you. For every significant item, record a clear disposition. “Still planned” is not a decision if no one has checked whether it still fits.
- Retain work that remains important to the player-facing promise and feasible in the current plan.
- Reduce work whose purpose matters but whose current form is too large. Preserve the experience it enables with a narrower version where possible.
- Defer work that may be worthwhile but is not necessary to validate or deliver the core experience now. Record what would need to be true before it returns to active scope.
- Cut work that no longer supports the promise, does not justify its cost, or would put more important work at risk.
Write down the decision and its reason in a place the team can find. A short note such as “deferred until the core traversal is proven; depends on the map tool” is more actionable than leaving the feature in a backlog with no status. Recording the rationale also reduces the chance that a cut item reappears as if the team had never considered it.
Revisit dependencies when a decision changes. Cutting one system may make another smaller or unnecessary; retaining a feature may require enabling work that was previously hidden. The scope is a connected plan, not a set of independent checkboxes. Make changes visible so the team can understand their consequences.
Use a bounded project as an example, not a schedule template
GDC’s 2020 session listing for Adam Robinson-Yu’s “Independent Games Summit: Crafting A Tiny Open World: ‘A Short Hike’ Postmortem” says he put a major project on the back burner for a prototype that became A Short Hike. The listing describes the small game’s initial release as coming together within a four-month deadline and says the talk addresses choices around visual style, level design, writing, and setting player expectations.
The useful lesson is that a bounded project can emerge from a deliberate change in direction and from choices about the experience the game should deliver. The four-month figure belongs to that project’s initial release as described by GDC; it is not a schedule to copy, a general production benchmark, or evidence that another team can make a comparable game in the same time. The session listing does not supply detailed production accounting or a complete history of which features were cut.
Apply the example as a prompt, not a formula: what larger commitment could you set aside to test a smaller idea, and what choices would make that smaller experience feel complete? Your own project’s capacity, quality target, disciplines, and uncertainties determine its plan.
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Keep the review focused on decisions the team can act on. You do not need a complex scoring system to make scope clearer; you need a shared promise, evidence about risk, and a visible record of what changed.
- Read the current one- or two-sentence promise. If the team no longer agrees on what players should experience, resolve that before judging feature requests.
- Identify the most consequential unresolved question. If it concerns whether the play is fun, plan a prototype. If it concerns whether representative work is feasible at the quality target, consider a small vertical slice.
- Review active work and its dependencies against actual progress. Identify assumptions that have been disproven or remain untested.
- For each proposed addition, discuss promise fit, uncertainty reduced, production effort, dependency impact, and whether deferral would damage the experience.
- Give affected work an explicit status: retain, reduce, defer, or cut. Capture the reason and any condition for reconsidering deferred work.
- Update the plan to reflect the decision. Do not leave the old expectation in place while informally hoping the team will absorb more work.
The point is not to eliminate uncertainty or guarantee delivery. It is to make uncertainty visible early enough that the team can respond without sacrificing the experience that made the game worth making.
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