A common mistake that new game developers make is biting off more than they can chew. Even experienced game developers make this mistake when they get really excited about a project, or when they approach a new technology and expect to be immediately proficient at using it. The real danger here is that you'll sit down and try to create your dream—let's say it's a sword and sorcery RPG epic that combines all the best parts of League of Legends, ChuChu Rocket!, and Microsoft Excel. When you've sunk days and weeks and months into it and it still looks nothing like the game you envisioned, you give up. You figure that since you failed at creating your dream game, you were never really cut out to be a game developer to begin with.
You owe it to yourself to start small! Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither was your dream cart-racing game starring famous figures from Roman history. By taking smaller steps, you can experience success with a number of smaller games. Then you can take what you learn and add to it, slowly building your expertise until you're in a position to take that dream game jar off the shelf.
For now, let's keep our dream shelf fully stocked, and turn our attention to something small and achievable. By the end of this book, you'll have a collection of working games that started out simply, and grew more and more complex as you got smarter. My hope is that once you finish this book, you'll be well-equipped to dream up new incremental features for your games, and to hunt down the resources you will need to fill the gaps in your new-found knowledge.
In Chapter 2, Let's Start with the Sky, we'll go into detail about where you should start when you're deciding what kind of game to create. We'll also see some real-world examples of games that began as simple, effective ideas and later grew into enormously complex and feature-rich titles. From small acorns, mighty multiplayer oak tree games grow.