David Sushil on his site and at GameCareer Guide, says their number is three:
- Incompatible mechanics
- Ubitquitous interaction
- Story dependence
I wonder: What are other problems do designers commonly get stuck on? I've considered 69 professional mistakes that I've seen (and made) over the last decade.
Dan Fiden spoke during the business of interactivity class on casual game design. From recall, the "design traps" of casual games he cited are something like:
- Designing for your peers, instead of your audience.
- Overloading the simulation with too many mechanisms (the kitchen sink).
- Failing to accept and tune from user feedback.
- Losing track of the design decisions and revisions.
- Innovating design for peer reputation (from a GDC talk).
- Limiting the design to your prototyping skill set.
Compared to David Sushil's three, these traps focus on the process rather than the design itself. I'll boldly step forward to list one mistake that is the most common one that I still make. It is also the most common problem that I identify in the work of beginning game designers, writers, and filmmakers:
- Cognitive leap. Failing to cue the user to get what it is that they are supposed to be doing and how to do it. Oftentimes, in my rush to cover a lot of ground in a first-pass, I omit some critical steps of user cognition, that would leave breadcrumbs, a cognitive trail in which the steps are not too far apart or not suddenly shifting in another direction without obvious cues in the story, interface, and look and feel.
In a quest to make players happy, I'd like to learn: What mistakes do you frequently find when designing, or reviewing, a game?