Hello everybody from the XNA community! My name is Robert Garza, and I hope to become an important contributing member to this circle of future developers.  I am aspiring designer/programmer and a little bit of an artist on the side.

As i get started developing using XNA and other tools, I have a simple question. How do you keep your aspirations grounded? How do you know if your game idea is too ambitious, or too large for a small group of friends to accomplish? 

Please share stories and advise for dealing with "pie in the sky" documentation and ideas, so that I can hopefully learn from your lessons.  Thanks for your time!

Good judgement comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgement.

The trick is for each new project to stretch yourself just a little beyond what you currently know how to do, but only a little.

If you don't stretch yourself at all, you'll never learn anything new. Plus half the fun of programming is the chance to learn new stuff!

But if you stretch yourself too far, you are unlikely to succeed at your final goal.

When you are planning a project, you should ask yourself, what percentage of the things needed for this do I already know how to do? If the answer is 100%, or even 90%, maybe you should try something more ambitious. But if the answer is just 10%, you should probably start with something a little easier.