A bunch of my friends from college kept telling me I’ve gotta play it, espectially because among them the only other game they all played was R6 Siege. I wasn’t too enthused considering all the discussion I can find of the game says it sucks now. When they eventually got me to play it I found it… ok.
Based on the demographics of those friends, I’d say it’s mostly popular among people who, if you asked them if they were really into games would say yes, but if you asked them for any “hidden gems” they’ve come across would give suggest highly recognizeable non-AAA games like Helldivers 2 or Balatro. Partly because their definition of “really into games” is that they play games that have an esports scene (even if their competitiveness goes only as far as playing in ranked matchmaking).
Sound pretentious for me to put it that way but I find that to be the pattern.
I’d have to subtly disagree with this. It is really good advice, especially when the scope of your game is larger than what one could reasonably finish in a game jam; If you can’t get to a fun game in a couple of days or less, you need documentation as to what your plan is to get there.
The problem is that this is the best advice for someone who has the technical “hard” skills to make a game (compsci, digital art, etc.), but lacks the "soft"er skills (software eng., scheduling, etc). To be fair that is super common, but the OP implies to me they’re not confident that they have the technical skills either yet.
Without either of those skills you can’t know what’ll take a couple of days or what’s actually weeks of work, and the value you get out of design docs becomes effectively random.
The common advice that I’d have to agree with is that your first few games should be as small of a scope as you can make them. Other comments to this post already go into detail, but the jist is that when you’re starting the amount you learn is more per-project than per-hour, so get out as many small things as possible to get your bearings.
Once you’ve done that, this is really good advice for your first sizeable project.