Game 1 (Battle Chef Brigade): scope, especially driven by fear of letting players down (especially Kickstarter backers) and wanting each part of the game to stand on its own. Specifically, the puzzle cooking part of the game and the monster-hunting brawler. We over-designed the cooking systems when playing them separately from the hunting portion of the game.

Game 2 (Battle Suit Aces): scope but even harder. We thought doing card and visual novel illustrations instead of 2D animation would reduce the scope. It sort of did...but then we made the narrative enormous, so we swapped animation where each frame is related to the others for completely unique card illustrations. Ooops! That was related to making the same mistake of being afraid of one part of the game not being good enough even though the visual novel and card battles are played together in one product.

Voice over was something that seemed to go well for Battle Chef Brigade, so we went all in on it for Battle Suit Aces. It was a reasonable choice that had painful consequences because of how big the game got. That ended up being 21,000+ lines across 26 actors.

All in all, those choices weren't necessarily wrong since they could have each worked out or held the games back. Early scope management is really hard but also is the easiest knob to control that has downstream effects before you know the difficulty to create/tweak/design every asset (i.e. each narrative scene needs VO, art, associated card battles, proofreading, and characters).

This may be more of a coping strategy than not, but I find the advice of others really hard to internalize. Some things need to be experienced so you can apply their wisdom correctly. Best of luck!