1) Don’t define success.
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“I want my game to be successful”, I hear all the time. But few people actually go and define what that means for them – whether they want their game to be supporting them financially, whether they want to use it as a showpiece for a portfolio that gets them into the triple A industry, or whether they want a little community where everyone loves each other. There’s a million ways to define ‘success’, but if you don’t take the time to do it (and really internalize it, dig deep into the WHYs), you’ll be flying blind and nothing will ever feel successful.
2) Complain and make excuses instead of working when the going gets tough.
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The #1 cause of failure of a game to be successful? Never getting it to market in the first place. However you define success, I bet it includes your game actually being shipped. Can’t do that without some grit. Motivation is great, except when you have none, sometimes for months, and you just let yourself stop working. Then the time draws on, you feel guilty, more time passes, you feel even more guilty every time you think of the project, and before you know it the avoidance-guilt cycle has taken over and your game is essentially doomed.
You gotta feed the cat even when it rains.
3) Refuse to listen to player feedback – or listen to too much of it.
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Players know what they want. Or do they?
Only you know what’s best for your game. Or do you?
The truth is in the happy medium. Players can only make suggestions using your game’s frame of reference. They can certainly tell you what’s not working, and you can gauge from their behaviour what is working.
(Oh, 3a would be not having any tracking in your game, so you don’t have any “went there, did that” data. Relying solely on the vocal minority can lead to trouble!)
But cater to their every whim, and soon you will have a broken, unbalanced, no-fun game that those same people will leave.
4) Jump from one project to the next.
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Sometimes you get tired of working on the same game for years, and want to work on something new. There’s no issue with that, unless it becomes a trend – starting many, getting bored, never finishing any of them. Unless your version of success is defined as “improve my game development skills”, which isn’t really the same as having your game be successful, this type of project-hopping will only derail you.
5) Work on whichever part of the game you feel like at the moment.
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Working on whatever you feel like is great, isn’t it? Except that shiny new feature won’t help if you have no players, and all the marketing in the world won’t help if your game is bugged to bits and not balance. Prioritization – not of your game as a whole, although that’s important too – but of the to-dos within your game is crucial.
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