Idea to features

You have a problem and a rough idea. Now turn it into features — specific things your user can actually do.

Not "it will be user-friendly" or "it will have a nice design". Those aren't features; they're hopes.

A feature completes this sentence: "The user can ___."

The user can add a homework task. The user can see what's due tomorrow. The user can tick something off. Each one is buildable and testable.

Write every feature you can think of, then sort each into three groups:

• Must — without this there's no product at all
• Should — makes it genuinely better, build if time allows
• Could — nice ideas for later

Be brutal about the Must list. If it has more than three or four items, you haven't finished sorting.

The Must list is what you build first and what you demo. Everything else is a bonus — and this is the same lesson as your game's core loop, at project scale.