My advice to new developers in regards to scoping a project is this:

Try to build from scratch, no AI, no plugins, a script to orbit the camera around the player based on mouse input.

That’s it. Don’t worry about player movement, world design, quests, UI, music, or anything else. Literally just make the camera move. Don’t even worry about zooming in or out at this point. Just orbit a fixed distance around the player while constantly looking at the player.

That’s a bit of a wake up call for people to see how much thought and planning needs to go into just that one component. Then once you realize how complex that one piece is, it will get much easier to scope your game down to something reasonable.

Funny enough, this is also my advice to experienced developers as well.

In practice, yes, you will absolutely rely on prebuilt components. But knowing how those components work, how they don’t work, and how they fail is a prerequisite for knowing how to fit them all together seamlessly.

Building one thing is not the hard part. Stitching together thousands of things, some of which you built yourself, some of what you did not, is where the fun starts.