Checklist for Creating a Good Game

Despite I make following lists mainly to remind myself, I hope it would be helpful to someone as well : ).

Know Your Genre

Each genre has its own vital features, don’t try to manipulate them if you don’t have very good reason to do so. According to my experience, missing only one vital feature can lead to failure of the game (cry).

Respect Your Audience

You have to worm welcome player to your world, try your best to make them feel comfortable as much as you can. Apart from that, you have to keep in mind that there are good player and bad player out there. Following are 2 major types of audience I can think about.

• Hardcore gamer: They have no problem to learn complicate mechanics. They love challenge and have high patient.
• Casual gamer: They don’t want to learn to play, they just want to play and want to win. Having said that, they also love challenge. Too high challenge will make them instantly quit the game. The game must be really forgiving to their mistake to encourage them to keep playing.
• Casual gamer often play a game on quite low-end machine some time they want to play on laptop, without mouse.

Right difficulty
Making a game too difficult hurts popularity of the game more than making a game too easy. Having said that, always making the game too easy is also not a good idea.

To make sure that wide range of people can enjoy the game, they should be able to select difficulty. Easy = very easy, Normal = quite easy,  Hard = hard!

Right controls

Fury Officer 2 is really good example for the great game that can’t shine because of awkward controls. It was too complicated and there were no good control scheme for its changing lane mechanic. You must try to design control scheme to fit with genre and to be friendly with other kind of device other than desktop.

Lively presentation

Static GUI is dated! Player need something fun to look into while they are using game interface. However if you overdone it, it will be annoying instead of being cool.

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