I've been getting into the early stages of developing a game concept, from the position of a near complete novice. My idea is very vague but I know enough of the elements to be able to break it down into numerous atomised technical challenges to be overcome, little things like making something move and emit a sound.

So far this approach seems to be working really well, I'm not getting overwhelmed or bogged down by trying to 'vertical slice' anything, and keeping the end goal very loosely defined means I can easily adopt new gameplay ideas as I come across them in the process of tinkering with the available tools and their interactions.

Once I've figured out all the individual challenges I can begin in earnest to craft the whole.