Top 5 Game Dev Mistakes! - (Game Jam Edition)

here the top five most common mistakes game developers seem to make in game gems I recently hosted my first game gem and I played every single one of your submissions so I finally have some data on this here are the five most common mistakes number 5 55% of all games did not have a proper tutorial or introduction which makes it very hard to play the game I don't want to show you any negative examples of this I don't want to point fingers at anybody let's have a look at a couple of solutions and positive examples inset here you can see an example from one of my games giant wall of text with ugly formatting that's how not to do it let players go through the motions let them try everything out and teach them one thing after another it is a lot easier to learn that way and even in-game gems there are clever and cost-efficient ways to do this placing the instruction text directly in the level is certainly one of them putting text directly into your level is usually something that's very easy and fast to implement so perfect for game

gems and on top of that it also results in a great learning experience because the player can go through the motions right away and it only shows information that is relevant right now there's no giant wall of text you can obviously also show the tutorial as UI overlay in this game I just have a text box down here and whenever I collide with an invisible trigger in the world it just changes the text of that text box so very easy to implement as well if you absolutely need a non-interactive tutorial screen then make sure it looks more like this very clean and simple and not like this if you have a lot of text it's a good idea to split it up into smaller chunks so it's more consumable and of course another excellent solution to the tutorial problem is just to make your games so intuitive and simple that it doesn't need one frog wants to eat bugs but we already know that so the game doesn't need to explain anything here it is pretty much impossible to enjoy a game without understanding it so be careful not having a proper introduction can quite heavily tank your writings it is no coincidence in my

opinion that the gem was won by a game that is very intuitive and easy to get into if you manage to pull that off and still make it original and interesting you've got a very good shot number 4 or balancing issues 63% of the games I played had either minor or major balancing issues this is an example I think I can show you because in general this is a very well balanced game I just think it would probably be quite a bit more fun if enemy projectiles were a bit slower so that's what I'd call a minor balancing issue in this case it's not a big deal the game is still pretty fun to play however in 27% of all games the balancing was a major fun killer for me I mean obviously keep in mind that all of these deaths are just purely based on my personal opinion and judgment so maybe you see this differently but I think you can get a lot more out of your games if you just spend a bit more time on balancing with the most important factors being the map size the overall speed of your game and the difficulty curve do not leave those three up to chance make a conscious decision what

you need for your game and another one a lot of people seem to get wrong or not care about is the size of your colliders and hitboxes even though this is a hugely important balancing factor and what I would always recommend is shaping the hitboxes to the advantage of the player usually that means making the hitboxes a bit smaller than the visuals to make sure that whenever you collide with an enemy it is very obvious that you collided with that enemy just barely touching something and still losing feels pretty every variable in your game matters so make sure you choose the correct numbers balancing can absolutely make or break your game number three is a soup optimal color scheme 65% of the games of clayed did not really have a proper color scheme this game here for example uses pretty simple shapes but it still looks beautiful simply because this specific combination of colors is pleasant to look at I feel like most people start prototyping their game with colors that look more like this and then they never bother to change it picking

nice colors is a challenge it might require a bit of practice but once you start getting a hang of it it's such an easy and effective way to make your game look beautiful I will definitely try to avoid these very pure colors all together give them a little bit of a tint into a different direction try giving black and gray tones a bit of colour as well use a lower amount colors because that makes it easier to manage maybe try contrasting some of your colors with their complementary color that can work really well or you know just grab an awesome color scheme from the internet your colors are certainly not the only thing that make or break the look of your game but they can be a low effort high impact factor to work on no effort not easy number two 67% of all games suffer from pacing issues so that means they're either too fast too slow the levels are too big too small something about the pacing was just off in most of the games obviously I'm once again just looking at this from my personal perspective so you might have a different opinion although

I'm not saying that I'm the guru and I do everything correctly and my games don't have any pacing and balancing issues at all I'm just really looking at this from an analytical point of view and yeah I'm not better I make the same mistakes and now that we got that out of the way you could argue that pacing is a part of balancing the reason why I decided to separate those two is so we can see more precisely where mistakes are happening and for me it seems like pacing issues are even more common than other balancing issues at the same time though they are not as game breaking they don't kill the fun of a game like some of the other balancing issues - what pacing in video games is usually about is keeping the player in the flow state and that means making sure it doesn't get too challenging but it also doesn't get boring I know that it is quite challenging to pull that off in a game jam because I've messed it up myself not only in this gem but also in the last one if you fall down in the end section of the light you basically have to replay the entire game which is horrible pacing and in my Ludum dare 43

game overcharge the difficulty curve is a bit too steep and also the last level has pretty poor pacing where the ground only disappears at the end of the level and you have to replay the easy part all over again stuff like that just breaks the flow of the game so what can we do about that how can we make sure the pacing of our games will be better from now on unfortunately I don't really have a super good answer maybe you can help me out here I'd say let's pay more attention to it let's pay more attention to parameters like levels eyes movement speed difficulty curve problem of course is that balancing all of that out takes time and is usually something you don't have a lot of in-game gems so a lot of it probably also comes down to proper time management mistake number one the most frequent mistake with 86% is not giving the player any proper feedback for what's going on when players get hurt you want to make sure they realize that they got hurt and when they lose you want to make sure they know why they

lost a lot of the games I played just went straight through the game over screen without giving me any kind of feedback what I did wrong stuff like that can feel very frustrating as a player and what I would recommend is just delay the game over screen for half a second or something like that give me a bit of time to realize what actually happened did I touch on enemy did I run out of energy and the same obviously also goes for positive feedback so if the player hits an enemy make that enemy flesh or give some sort of feedback that indicates that you did something positive giving proper feedback to your players makes it a lot easier to understand your game it helps you to solve the tutorial problem because people can just figure out your game by themselves and at the same time it just makes your game a lot more satisfying to play obviously we need to keep in mind that all of those games were three day game jam games so there's obviously not enough time to polish everything out perfectly nevertheless I hope that will keep those five things in mind and do a better job next time hope you enjoyed watching this is a channel about game development it subscribe see you next

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