50 Ways to Make Us HATE Your Flash Game


Written By MrSun at 1:13 pm - Saturday, July 26th, 2008
Categories: Flash

Do you like this post? Then you’ll LOVE its sequel!

Here is a list of things NOT to do when developing a flash game. I’ve made quite a few of these mistakes myself in my games, hopefully you’ll learn from them.

  1. Add loud and annoying sound effects to your game
  2. Don’t add a mute buttons so we have to listen to your loud and annoying sound effects
  3. Make your game ridiculously hard
  4. Don’t put in a preloader
  5. Have a confusing menu system
  6. Forget to embed all of your dynamic textfields
  7. Make a game from a tutorial and submit it without making any kinds of changes
  8. Have sloppy art
  9. Add Mochiads everywhere (unless you need to load external stuff everywhere)
  10. Don’t optimize your code
  11. Add a bunch of cool effects that require lots of processing power but can’t be deactivated
  12. Don’t fix the bugs
  13. Have long animations that we can’t skip
  14. Don’t credit the artists of the music
  15. Don’t compress the music
  16. Don’t give us a clear goal to beat the game (although some games can pull this off)
  17. Add glow effects to everything
  18. Give us a seizure
  19. Make confusing controls
  20. Make the screen really really big
  21. Make the screen really really small
  22. Have a really fast frame rate
  23. Make links navigate from the current page, not a blank page
  24. Don’t put checkpoints anywhere when you have a long game
  25. If you let us save the game, don’t also add an autosave function. We’ll definitely remember
  26. Make us buy a “premium version” in order to keep playing the game
  27. Make the instructions all text with no explanatory pictures/diagrams
  28. Make a storyline without an animation to explain it
  29. Make it easy for us to cheat
  30. Create an ugly color scheme
  31. Make the text unreadable
  32. Don’t let the buttons look like buttons, we’ll obviously find them very easily
  33. Make us wait a long time to play or while playing your game
  34. Host your game on a slow server
  35. Don’t fix the typos
  36. Make fun of us
  37. Very repetitive gameplay
  38. Don’t let us pause the game
  39. Add pointless features that add a lot of file size
  40. Insult our intelligence
  41. Make a really long menu system
  42. Make us have to navigate through the entire menu system after we lose the game
  43. Camouflage the enemies so we can’t see them until we randomly begin losing health or lose the game
  44. Don’t put rollOver functions onto your buttons
  45. Make gameplay really slow
  46. Make loss inevitable
  47. Don’t put in a scoring system. We don’t want to know how well we did
  48. Make stupid computer AI
  49. Deceive us
  50. Make the description of the game really short or really obscure

Of course, some games can get away with some of these things. But it’s a combination of all of these that makes us really hate your game.

5 Comments

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