Game development is a kitchen. It’s hot, it’s chaotic, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll be buried under the weight of your own bad decisions. One of the worst decisions? Letting scope creep slide in like an uninvited guest at your dinner party, eating all the good charcuterie and washing it down with your best bottle of bourbon. Before you know it, what started as a lean, mean dish—simple, flavorful, executable—turns into an unholy mess of half-baked ideas, a bloated project staggering toward inevitable collapse.

The High Cost of More

Everyone wants more. More features, more depth, more polish. More is sexy. More gets headlines. More makes you think you’re building something legendary. But here’s the thing: More is also a death sentence. It’s the reason why small indie teams get crushed under their own ambitions, why projects stall out and die before they ever see the light of day.

Ever see a kitchen overcompensate? A dish that started as a humble, elegant carbonara but then some jackass decided to throw in truffle oil, lobster, and a drizzle of aged balsamic because, hey, “it needs something extra”? That’s your game when scope creep takes hold. A cluttered, confused mess, where the original brilliance is lost under a pile of unnecessary bullshit.

Lock It Down Early

Great chefs don’t just throw things into a pan and hope for the best. They plan. They mise en place their ingredients. They understand what the dish is before they start cooking. If you don’t do that with your game, you’re doomed.

Before a single line of code is written, before a sprite is drawn, before your composer starts noodling on a theme, you need to lock your game’s scope down. What are you making? Who is it for? What’s the absolute minimum you need to ship something great? Write that down. Carve it into stone. Anything that doesn’t serve that core experience is noise.

The Myth of Future You

There’s this insidious little voice that sneaks into your head when you’re deep in development. “Future Me will have time to add this cool feature. Future Me will totally have the bandwidth to implement a full crafting system on top of this already complicated combat loop.” Future You is a liar. Future You is buried under bug fixes, balancing issues, and the sheer, soul-crushing grind of getting a game out the door.

Kill Future You before he screws you over. If it’s not essential, it doesn’t go in. Simple as that.

Deadlines Are Your Friend

A good restaurant doesn’t let a dish sit in development for years. A chef doesn’t get to say, “Yeah, the steak frites will be ready when it’s ready.” No. The ticket comes in, and you execute. Game development should be the same. Set deadlines. Hold yourself accountable. If something isn’t working, cut it, adapt, move forward.

Perfection is an illusion. Shipped is real.

The Feature Graveyard

Every project has a graveyard. A digital wasteland of features that seemed like a good idea at the time but, in reality, would have sunk the whole operation. Learn to love the graveyard. Cut early, cut often. A brutally efficient kitchen throws out anything that doesn’t belong on the plate. Your game deserves the same discipline.

Some features might hurt to cut. Maybe you spent weeks on a dialogue system that no longer makes sense for the game. Maybe you thought a branching narrative would be amazing, but now it’s a tangled mess of half-finished storylines. Let it go. The moment you start clinging to features out of personal attachment rather than necessity, you’re done.

The Art of Saying No

Game development is collaborative. That’s beautiful, but it’s also dangerous. Ideas will come from everywhere—your team, your playtesters, your Discord community, your best friend who doesn’t even play games but just watched a cool YouTube video about procedural generation. You need to learn the art of saying no.

No, we’re not adding an open world. No, we’re not suddenly pivoting to an RPG. No, we don’t need a fishing minigame. Stick to the plan. Stay focused.

Small, Sharp, and Shippable

The best meals aren’t the ones drowning in unnecessary ingredients. They’re the ones where every element serves a purpose, where each bite tells a story. Your game should be the same way.

Small doesn’t mean lacking depth. It means controlled, deliberate, intentional. If you want longevity, if you want replayability, you design for it within constraints—not by stuffing more onto the plate but by refining what’s already there.

The Hardest Part: Knowing When It’s Done

The temptation to keep adding, keep tweaking, keep perfecting—it never goes away. But at some point, you have to put the damn plate on the pass and let it go. A great chef knows when to stop. A great game designer does too.

Your game will never be perfect. No game is. But done is better than perfect. Done is real. Done means players are actually experiencing your work rather than it collecting dust in your hard drive.

So finish your game. Ship it. Move on. And for the love of all that is holy, don’t let scope creep drag you into the abyss.

Bon appétit.