The Common Mistake

There is one mistake that practically every game designer and developer makes, the big and famous ones included. I made it for years. It's so common that most people never find out it was a mistake at all. They just notice, years later, that something about their work always felt off.

This part is about that mistake: what it is, how it shows up in real projects, how I learned it the hard way, and the traps that lead people into it, like popularity, tradition and making games for the wrong reason. It ends with the Holy Grail itself, the four things a game design has to satisfy to be the best it can be.

Think of this part as the preparation. Once you can see the mistake, the rest of the book makes sense.