The Do's & Do Not's of Game Design

great post, thanks for sharing!

Found an interesting article on Rock, Paper, Shotgun concerning several general rules of game design. I found them to be good and simple guidelines and certainly things to think about in any stage of the game-development process.

You can read the story here.

My favorites:

> DO let me flush the toilets and turn on the taps. Scenery, in any game of any genre, shouldn?t be painted on the walls. And so many games before have put in a nice toilet flushing noise. Since all games do insist in including a toilet, as well they should, then all games should include the splishy sploshy noise of flushing it.

> quote]

DON'T leave diary entries by one person scattered over miles of corridors, buildings and countries. That?s not how a diary works. A diary tends to be all in one place. Most people, when journaling their lives, don?t tend to scribble it out on the nearest scrap of paper and then leave it wherever they wrote it. Because that would be utterly insane.

he Bespectacled One2011-12-30 04:30:51

Awesome, Nice Tips XD

Nice post shared !!

Thanks for sharing.

Lots of these are kind of obvious when you actually stop to think about it.

Good stuff to keep in mind during any game development.

Thanks for the share. That's really helpful!

The comments are hilarious! Thank you for sharing.

[quote:2gyihqzb]DON'T leave diary entries by one person scattered over miles of corridors, buildings and countries. That?s not how a diary works. A diary tends to be all in one place. Most people, when journaling their lives, don?t tend to scribble it out on the nearest scrap of paper and then leave it wherever they wrote it. Because that would be utterly insane.

That seems to be very common in indie games, it's the new form of collectibles. Though if it was the main focus of the game, it would suck. Perfect side quest material though I think.

Maybe new game idea: Research why there are so many diary pages strewn all over the world! Maybe there's a diary-napping villain? Or is a new plague that affect the mind of people?

the devils in the detail

Great article! Will definitely be referring to this more often.

Personal Favorites:

DON’T splash on my screen. I AM NOT A SCREEN! I’M A HUMAN! When it rains, this does not leave droplets running down the front of my vision. This is because I have a face, including a nose, chin and forehead. Concealed between these features are my eyes – two orbs that sit within the protective bonage of my skull, accompanied by the cleaning and dust-deflecting skinflaps of my eyelids. Were raindrops, or worse, splatters of blood, to become visible droplets in my vision, they would have to be on my eyes. I would respond to this by running around, screaming in pain and fear, clutching at my face and begging for help. You appear to be under the impression that I am a sentient monitor. Perhaps a screen mounted on top of human shoulders. I’m not one of these. I’m reasonably sure the character in the game isn’t one of these. So just perhaps can we please stop having splashes appear in front of our view? (Oh, and I’m also not a bloody camera lens, so can we also get rid of lens flare too? Kthnx.)

DO save my checkpoints – it’s not actually against the law for me to stop playing a game and then play it again later on. It’s not cheating. It’s not weird. It’s what people do. Why on EARTH should I have to start an entire mission from the beginning just because I wasn’t able to play your game non-stop from beginning to end? You lunatics.

DON’T ask me if I’m sure about every single thing I do. Again, here I ultimately want the psychic detection systems in place, so games can only ask me this when I have somehow clicked to close the game instead of return to it, and not when I haven’t, but again I’m exhibiting unusual levels of tolerance here in allowing intermediary measures. On this occasion, how about you don’t warn me I’m going to save over an older save game when I’ve had to overwrite an older one due to your ludicrous paucity of save slots, by laboriously double-clicking on one in order to make it available. It’s hard to do that by mistake.

And that's only a few

Thanks for the article, it helped a lot

That's Good.

the Bespectacled One, your great find is a mine of wealth that certainly offers enrichment for the game developer mind and continues to nourish endlessly. Sharing makes the community wiser - thanks mate!

A great article! Seems the game designer needs to be a very passionate person, I totally got it after watching the Indie Game movie

A great article! Seems the game designer needs to be a very passionate person, I totally got it after watching the Indie Game movie

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