I agree. It is better to finish a small project than start a big one and never finish it. I have seen a few people, and a few groups of people, who had big impressive plans... and never delivered. It is easy to imagine big: this game should be 3D, full of action, but also logical puzzles, and strategy, with an AI opponent, and also multiplayer; perfect graphics and a great storyline, but also allow complete freedom of movement... and then, five years later, you have five characters made in Blender, a map of the world where the story is supposed to happen, a list of fifty magic spells divided into multiple categories, and a tech demo where one of those characters is walking across an endless green plane.

If you can't make a small game, you can't make a big game. So make the small game first; it should take much less time than the big game, so if you are afraid that doing the small game would waste too much of your time, you are definitely not ready for the big game.

Even the small game requires a lot of work to make it look nice. Consider minesweeper: after implementing the minimum mechanism (click on a field to expose it, you either die or not, the number of adjacent mines is displayed), you are not even half done. You need the recursive exposure for fields with zero adjacent mines, editing the flags, showing the unflagged adjacent fields. Preventing the first click from being a mine. A hi-score table, where you can write your name, and it gets automatically saved, and loaded at start of the game. A menu to choose between simple, medium, and hard version of the game, maybe also custom dimensions. Should the game pause when minimized? All these details matter for user experience. Maybe also an installer?

On the other hand, if you can do the minesweeper right, you can easily create a new interesting game by tweaking some details. Maybe, play on a hexagonal map? Or play on an infinite map that scrolls to the right when you completely clear the leftmost column (except for the fields containing mines)? Add some bonuses (that you can collect by clearing a certain area) that allow you special moves, such as eliminating a mine, or reshuffling the existing mines? Would it be possible to create a version where you can have more then one mine per field? (Just a quick idea I had now, I don't even know whether that makes sense.) Maybe add some time pressure, like you need to make a click before the timer runs out, or maybe every twenty seconds a new mine is added to the plan (make sure it is not right under the user's cursor)? Or just make some non-functional feature, such as displaying a pretty picture in the background, and you get a new pretty picture when you complete the level.

My game is both "small" and "large" in scope at the same time. Its large in the sense that its a Multiplayer Online Game. But the scope of the gameplay is rather limited. I'm not trying to make a full-out MMORPG with all the content expected of one. And that was never my intention. Its an MMO in the sense that the server architecture can support a lot of players and AI units in the world.

Yet I feel like I get wrongly misjudged as a delusional person trying to make a full-out MMORPG. No my game doesn't have a focus on questing, professions, or theme-park areas and raids. People in this industry are too quick to Pidgeon-hole you into existing game genres when you may be trying to do something new entirely.

I have a playable demo, some interested players who provide feedback in discord, etc. The game mechanics started simple but have gotten more complex with each update. A lot of work is spent in improving the AI and making them behave "smartly". I pay for server hosting and manage the servers. Its just me. But it feels like I don't even get my resume looked at when I'm applying to jobs in the industry. Because I don't have any prior experience?

paused minesweeper game is a thing?