6 Game Design Mistakes You MUST Avoid

hey guys long story short uh I've been in the thick of it with my game Twisted Tower meaning we're I can't say too much but we're wrapping up the game and man it has been a brutal a brutal summer um so so much feedback so many complaints so many good things so many not so good things constructive criticism all around right and we're trying to make this game amazing right now it is is looking so good and it didn't get there just by accident um it was actually through six game design principles and these game design principles if I'm being completely honest with you I learned these six game design principles this year we've been working on this game for three years I learned them this year and I don't want you to do what I've done I don't want you to make the mistakes I've made and spend two years making horrible decisions about game design and only come to the last year to

development and and have to fix it all and we did fix it all and so I'm going to tell you these six game design principles and I think these are going to change your entire outlook on on your game and they're going to help your game actually be fun but more importantly cheaper to make cheaper to make because at the end of the day if you're only focusing on what really matters for your game that means you don't focus on the other stuff AKA feature creep and spend way more time than you should so you're going to learn from my mistakes here let's jump into this the first mistake okay or the the first principle really that I've learned is show the problem before the solution okay now if you show the problem before the solution um what that means is the player feels like they solved the problem so number one you've got reward right so for example in our game uh Twisted Tower

I'm not even joking and this is embarrassing to say but it's true um we had keys being given before locks and by the way when I say Key and Lock I just mean anything that blocks the player uh and anything that solves that blockage okay so so we were giving the solution before the problem so they'd get a key and they' go okay and then they would just go walk through a door they don't feel like they solved it so what you do in your game whether it's 2D or 3D is you show the lock before the key this seems obvious right but it's so funny that even if you do know this principle how often it's broken and that is because game play or uh players tend to want to do exactly the opposite of what you want them to do right so it's important for you to watch um testers play your game and you'll notice that they skip the key or the

lock and they go straight to the key they didn't even see the lock so you have to guide them to the lock first okay this could be a gate it can be a locked door it can be an NPC that needs a fetch Quest really it's just something that blocks the player so make sure you show that before the solution okay number two this the second game design principle I've learned your level is f and this is 2D or 3D it doesn't matter your level or the level design is five times more complex than you think as the developer it's five times more complicated than you think this was so true with Twisted Tower during development or during testing players would spend an hour in one area when I thought it was going to take like 20 minutes they'll get lost they'll backtrack and go to a previous

level they'll get frustrated and bored and quit if the level's too complicated now it's okay like this this principle is not necessarily A Bad Thing For example towards the end of your game when you have a really challenging level that's kind of cool that it's five times more complicated right that means it's difficult and challenging and maybe something that maybe a puzzle box or something they need to solve and mazes frankly aren't a ter terrible thing as long as you're not introducing it at the beginning of your game and so this is why the beginning of your game is always the most important it also takes takes the most development time the beginning of your game is where you're teaching the player about the game so you don't want them to get lost immediately or give them too much of a challenge unless it's dark souls give them too much of a challenge at the beginning of your game and it's five times more complicated than you think why because you made it right so

no matter how hard you try to be sympathetic to the player you can never fully grasp how they see your world you see it through a totally different lens you see it through the bird's eye lens or view right you see the top down even when you're playing in first person or even when you're scrolling inid scroller you know the big picture so you're never going to fully understand what a player is seeing because you have the full context okay what does that mean it means simplify your levels it's okay simplify them dumb them down in fact with Twisted Tower we had a level that we cut in half and we did it in an hour just cut stuff just deleted stuff because it was unnecessary and it was at the beginning of the game and now the game feels so much better number three giving the player mechanical choices as opposed to world or level

design choices is a bigger bang for your buck I know this one's a little confusing um let me try and explain so with my games pinstripe Never song and twisted tower all of these games all of these games I rarely ever created mechanical choices for the player so like you get this weapon or you get this weapon you right click for this ability and you left click for this ability you purchase a secondary fire right when you hold space you do a super jump or you can do a fast jump right like all these different options when you when you sprint and Crouch you slide right all these different mechanical options giving the player what a choice on how they play the game this seems so obvious to me now but seriously I got away with this for the last decade of not worrying about this stuff right

and frankly I put Band-Aids on my games and those Band-Aids were music story The the mood right and the player didn't really have much of a mechanical choice on how they played the game instead I would I would focus on world choices so I would give them like multiple paths they could go down right or let them choose one door over another door or let them backtrack in a different way now that's cool it's fun to give the player pathing choices in your game but you get a bigger bang for your buck when you just integrate a secondary fire into the into the weapon for example or you integrate a a different kind of jump depending on how the player presses space right giving them upgrades for weapons sure it takes time and effort in fact it probably takes more time and effort to make a uh a mechanical Choice than a world choice right it might take

more time for one mechanical choice but the value is so much bigger because the players going to be able to experience that mechanical Choice throughout the entire game in all kinds of situations as opposed to just focusing on one you know pathing choice okay so try your best to focus on giving the player mechanical choices options ways to play the game I know this seems obvious but so many people don't do this including me and I I didn't do it for 10 years okay number four and by the way when I'm saying all this I know it's embarrassing because I should know all this but I don't um and I'm just being honest with you if the player doesn't no this is number four if the player doesn't learn something that can be used to their advantage in the future they will get bored if the player doesn't learn something that they can they can use to their advantage in the future they will get get bored this is why telegraphing

is fun okay telegraphing in your enemies AKA your enemy shows an animation plays a sound and stops and prepares to attack if that's randomized it's not fun now this is so weird it's weird because I why is this weird it's weird because I should know this I should know this but I didn't know this that and so I'm kind of embarrassed by it but in my previous games I thought it was cool to randomize enemies okay so give this enemy they both look the same but this one's a little bit weirder than this one this one's faster this one's slower right this one attacks faster this one attacks slower this is a terrible idea at least for most games okay now if you're in a specific genre that you want to randomize enemies then I guess that's your prerogative but for most games you want the player to learn how an enemy behaves

and then you want to then give the player the option to take advantage of what they've learned and so they feel like they're becoming better at the game it's pretty straightforward right so telegraphing is is one way to do this right but it's also just about really good teaching okay so teaching the player about the game and that brings me to my next point the fifth game design principle I've learned is don't be afraid to just tell the player what's going on okay so the way I used to make my games is I wanted every teaching moment to be integrated into the world so that it doesn't break immersion okay so an example of this is halflife halflife does this really really well everything you learn is pretty much just learned in the world or an NPC tells you but they tell you in a with with a World building flare as opposed to just being almost meta and telling the player exactly what to do

right now that's cool and frankly I would I would I would rather that be how you teach the player about a mechanic than some like overlay but I just want to say it's okay to do an overlay especially as Indies so for me we had I think five or six different mechanics in the game in Twisted Tower where we would we would have beta testers play the game and they had no idea what was going on and no matter how hard I tried to explain it in the world visually they just didn't get it and it really threw a wrench in the whole game because they were confused and so they got confused once and then 20 minutes later they get confused again and then they get confused again and again and again and the confusion Stacks up to a point where they get frustrated because they almost feel blind playing the game so don't be afraid to just tell the player what's going on on so that's what

I told myself I said all right I'm not going to be afraid of this anymore I'm giving you a freaking overlay and I I put the overlay on screen when they enter a trigger Zone and it says this is this this is how you use it press X for X right very very straightforward no World building no NPC trying to teach you guys it's okay to do that it's okay to use youi and overlays to teach the player what's going on okay number six when in doubt surprise the player and I've learned this one this week um we have we're we're really focused on the first chapter of the game uh I think I've mentioned this but long story short the first 10 minutes of your game are so important um because it's going to tell it's going to inform the player of what they're going to get like for example it's it's I think it's called the mystery box or the I think it's called the mystery box principle or something I'll just make it up it's the

Mi Mystery Box principle if you show the player a mystery at the beginning of the game then they're going to work five to 10 hours to solve that mystery okay so for example White Lotus is a great TV show White Lotus gives you it tells you that somebody died and then you meet the cast of characters and so you watch the whole show because you want to know who died and you were told that at the beginning okay so the reason I bring this up is because you want that first 10 minutes of your game to introduce something some kind of itch so that the player wants to scratch that itch as they play the game admittedly no matter how hard you try to ensure that that is that is a really enticing introduction to the game there are moments that are going to get boring okay and so when the when in doubt when the player when you feel like the player might be bored or they might getting kind of exhausted by something that's

repetitive surprise the player okay and we call them twists in our game because it's called Twisted Tower and so you want to twist you want to do something that's twisted or or change so for example let's say you understand your your gameplay Loop the gameplay Loop is let's say collect 100 coins insert the coins into a vending machine and get a star and the star takes you to the next level okay let's just say that's your Loop well maybe on the third level the vending machine explodes right and you have to go find all five pieces of the vending machine to put it back together so we're just introducing a surprise it's pretty straightforward honestly it can be as simple as a jump scare right if you're making a horror game or an immersive Sim or it can be that you know one of the enemies this is something we've done in our game one of the enemies instead

of them being prepared to attack you they're actually waving at you hey they're just smiling at you and as you approach then you do a jump scare right stuff like that where you take the current system you have the mechanics you have and the loop you have and then you just create little pops and changes in those mechanics okay I'll give you a bonus here so bonus design principle this is I think it's it's the one that I've used the most in the last 10 years throw in funsies I'll explain what those are throw in funsies in dry spots okay so this is similar to number six but it's it's less of a surprise and it's more of just an additional feature okay so with my game Never song it was fine the game was fine and I remember one day going I want to be able to hit Wheels

with a hammer or with with my baseball bat it was a baseball bat and it it was a side scroller so now we put all these pin Wheels throughout the game and so when you whack these pin Wheels they spin and they emit particles and it's a really fun sound they have no function in the game yet for some reason the game was like twice as fun and that's because the player when there's something subconscious that happens when the players feeling bored or they're getting a little annoyed with how repetitive the game is and honestly that's just going to happen when they start getting annoyed they go you know I'm going to go whack some pin wheels and you give them the option to get a a serotonin boost or something by just going and messing with some funsy so this we we have these in Twisted Tower just pumpkins that you can smash with your Hammer right um also interactables you can can include like even a newspaper you can

read or a painting that you can observe uh stuff like that is I I would consider that consider that an interactable or maybe even a funsie right just something that's kind of Irrelevant for the game so that's really seven game design principles that I've learned these are so important to me um and I was able to write these down in like like 5 Seconds cuz I just they've been rumbling through my head all year as we've been wrapping up Twisted Tower um if you if you really found this valuable and you want to learn how to take principles like this and take your prototype take your game and turn it into a six-figure paycheck whether that's with Kickstarter or finding a publisher or an investor uh there's a link below to a totally free no gimmicks totally free webinar that's going to teach you how to do that um I'm kind of the perfect person to teach you about this because I've done this multiple times um I've I've got I've signed I've actually signed four publisher agreements in my life um and two

Kickstarter campaigns um one raised hundred some thousand and another one raised almost 990,000 um I've also done deals with platforms and I've also hit the steam front page multiple times with my games I'm going to teach you all about that below so click the link below if you're interested and I will talk to you guys later cheers