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Common Design Issues (+ Solutions) in 150+ Games (Patreon)

Published:
2025-11-10 16:40:43
Imported:
2025-11
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Shen

I thought Satan was wearing cat ears, took me a second to realize they were like... phone cord horn things LOL Absolutely not game design related but that segment made me think of a lower-production-value Contrapoints video haha Re: making small games, I think the other reason to do it (esp to play other people's jam entries or small projects on itch.io) is that small games are easier to analyze, especially if they are not succeeding in the specific thing they're trying to do. They're condensed usually into a single mechanic or goal so you can break it apart easier. When we play polished, commercially successful games (whether indie or not), it's hard to fully understand why they made the choices they made - but if you compare games to each other and what some do well and some don't do well, you can better understand what *not* to do and why, and therefore why the "good" game made the choices it did. When you play people's dinky games on itch.io I think the attitude you don't want to be playing as a consumer, which tends to be just "that game was good or bad or interesting, or I like/didn't like it, or it was original/unoriginal," you want the attitude of a craftsperson which is more like "what is this game trying to do, is it working, what possible solutions are there if it isn't." Timothy Cain has this video about analyzing game designs and I think he tends to play longer games (he'll play something for an hour before dropping it) but he has a helpful approach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jmq5bOpQ4O8 and basically you want to take that attitude to the small games, too.

Patrick Pilmeyer

I am going to share a "copy" mistake I did. I am making a game mixing 9kings and Backpack hero. And I just implemented the inventory management, everything was working fine. I can put buildings (my version of items), in a base like it is an inventory. But, I did not understand (not really) the progression system of backpack hero, you get items over time, more than you can really carry, but, these items are not equal, some are rare, some fits your current build. You are okay to discard one because you are getting a better version of it. In my game, you are buying the buildings and you do not receive them, and there are less buildings, which means you never want to discard them. They are more like 9 kings progression, each different, not having a building being a more rare more powerful version of another. I can't really afford to make way more building with the current art style, and the game still works. But I will always know that I could have started better. Well, before, I saw game inspiration as list of features, now, I see these features and ask the question what does that fit in the rest of the game. Probably going to be wrong, but probably a bit more right than before.