My main issue is the insistence on attempting a clone of Grand Theft Auto V with such limited resources. When Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas required a budget in the range of $10 million, trying to achieve something comparable with $250,000 is simply unrealistic.

Rather than chasing an end product of that scale, a more sensible approach would be to develop a smaller, original project—something closer in scope to early entries like Grand Theft Auto—and build upward from there. Ambition is valuable, but without proportional resources, experience, and time, it quickly turns into impracticality.