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:
<font color="blue">DO</font> 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]
<font color="red">DON'T</font> 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.edited><editid>The Bespectacled One</editid><editdate>2011-12-30 04:30:51</editdate></edited>