Content/scope creep is the biggest universal problem across all of the entertainment industry. Many authors average 1-2 novels per year. Movies and games will have teams of 6-12 or even as many as 30 and still not be able to produce a single story within YEARS.
Everyone wants to copy the guys that have driven the entertainment industry into the ground. For some reason, no one wants to follow the blueprints to how it became so successful in the first place. Everyone wants to be the badass slow-walking away from an explosion rather than being the guy behind cover when the explosion goes off. If you want to be successful doing this, you need to do it one step at a time. Step one - write your fucking script. You can cut and tweak it later if necessary, but you need to know what you're creating when you're trying to create it. That way, you'll know what you can reasonably achieve or find where you lost the plot before you've invested years into developing something that you just completely fucked up after years of development. When you're still in the writing process, it can still be fixed. Ain't no one happy about Ocean redoing both of his games years into development on both of them.
One of the more successful VN teams just took nearly 3x as long as intended for their newest update. Reason - having to rewrite the entire fucking update after deciding it didn't actually work AFTER all of the renders and animations had been completed. And the writer hadn't even started writing until after the prior update had been completed. That never should have happened. Worst case scenario, that should have been resolved before the prior update had even been released, not after production had technically been completed on the "current" discarded update.
The AWAM dev is on the record stating the most time consuming part of his development is the writing - and that fucker has slow-burned his AVN through basically two entire fucking games before we finally started getting any payoff. Writing his script first would've resolved that issue.
And if you're wanting to include things like corruption systems, it's a whole lot easier to pull off when you know where you're wanting the story to go before you get there. Meaning games like Pandora's Box wouldn't completely break if you accidentally make one "wrong" decision.
