Game design advice: Forgive slight player's mistakes

You, as a developer, know every detail of your game. You played it multiple times before the release. So, your perception of a game's difficulty might drastically differ from the perception of the players who play it for the first time in their life. Yes, quite a number of developers set the difficulty in their game to be too high.

Especially this tendency became wide-spread after the success of Flappy Bird. Many beginner developers thought, that if a super-difficult game became popular, that if they'd made a super-difficult game, it will instantly become popular. We've got a flood of really difficult games, but most of them failed to grab the player's attention.

So, you've made a game...

As you probably know, I'm FGL_Alexey at FGL, the community of indie game developers. One of my tasks is to help indie game developers to make their games better. As the developer uploads the game to us, I can give a free pre-review. I play the game, record 5-15 minutes viteo and share my impressions, as a 1st time player. Also I give my suggestions on the game's enhancement.

Since 2012 I've made more than 1500 video reviews. I noticed that the often I give the same advice to the different game developers. So, I summarized my advice in the form of a conference talk.

I gave this talk at Next Castle Party, also it was a part of my talk "Increasing Revenue in Indie Game Development" at Dubai World Game Summit. Now I'm going to write a series of blog posts based on my presentation slides and my new developer relation's experience. These advice can be applied to web, mobile and PC games, with some platform-related variations.

1. Make sure you have a proper game screens navigation.

If you are going to stay in gamedev for long and use the same technology to create several games (not necessarily of the same series) it's useful to make a game template, which would enable such navigation: