Design Blog

Sunday, May 10, 2009

10 Pitfalls of Game Design

Normally I don't like to post something so small and trivial as a link to a new article since I feel that when you make a blog post it should be something meaningful.

However, I'll make an exception this time and post to this article about the 10 Game Design Process Pitfalls.

It's a really good read. Even though I think a lot of the things he talks about should be obvious to most designers, I think they are also the things that tend to get caught up and missed in the design process and deadline crunches.

In short the pitfalls are:
1. Not playing games
2. Overemphasizing paper designs
3. Not using peer review
4. Choosing leads for production skills and not content creation skills
5. Not using placeholders
6. Letting the story control the design
7. Restricting designer tools
8. Building before you find "fun"
9. Out of date documentation
10. Not using outside playtesting

I'm not going to go over these here though, since the author does a much better job. But these are things I definitely will take to heart and try and remember so that I won't fall into the same pitfalls.

Labels: design philosophy

posted by Saikyo at 4:34 PM