Rules for making games

• If you have some control over it, and it affects the player's experience, you should either design it, or think very hard about why you're not going to.
• Relatedly: "A play begins when you first hear about it, and ends when you stop thinking about it" -- Tassos Stevens
• Making a game is easy. Finishing a game is difficult. Selling a game is almost impossible.
• Tell people about your stuff - you owe it to the work.
• Which future of games is correct? All of them. No platform/genre/style/whatever ever really goes away, it just gets more niche.
• It can be useful to start with an interesting problem, then try to solve it as well as possible.
• Relatedly: It's important to know what problem you're trying to solve.
• Relatedly: Don't import conventions without examining them carefully.
• If you start by building an engine, you'll never make a game.
• Try the stupid/simple solution first.
• The easiest way to be beautiful is to be consistent.
• It doesn't matter if what you're making stops being a "game" halfway through. Or even if it never starts as one at all.
• Sometimes you need to slog through it. But you're basically useless at design when you're slogging. So take a break!
• What you make matters more than how well you make it / Your life is finite.
• Try to work in a way that's sustainable. Do you want to be doing this in ten years time?
• Don't talk all the excitement out of a project, save some of it for actually building the thing.
• Trying to find ways to break definitions is a good way to innovate.
• If you rip off unexpected things, people will call you original.
• It's never the player's fault.
• Be generous.

I liked writing this because I hate prescriptive rules about game making. Also because it's such an incredible act of hubris.

I'm posting it because I'm curious how well they'll stand up.
Sat Jan 19, 2013