I play a lot of games. A lot of the games I play are made by young developers learning their trade or by self-taught hobbyists. I love playing such games, and I want them to be even better, so if any of this applies to you, please take it as constructive criticism coming from a place of love, not as some bitter diatribe.

There are some recurring issues that I see in many games from beginning developers—and in some games by seasoned devs—that bug me. Call them my pet peeves, though I can only assume that I’m not the only one bothered by these things. So, I’m presenting them here for anyone who wants to nip them in the bud.

Terminate jumps. In a platformer, I don’t want to keep jumping if I leave my finger on the jump key. In the interests of precision, it’s best if another jump is not triggered until the player releases the key and then presses it down again.

Check your hitboxes. Oversized hitboxes have been a problem since the earliest videogames. I enjoy action games that are hard but fair. One of the surest ways to make a game feel unfair is to make me take damage or lose a life when nothing touched me. Collisions must be not only detected, but also visible to the naked eye. In fact, I’d rather a hitbox be too small than too big, since I don’t mind seeing two sprites/polygons/voxels brush against each other without a collision being detected nearly as much.

Let me use the arrow keys. In the best of all possible worlds, every game’s keyboard controls would be customizable. Barring that, I’d at least like a pair of options. Assuming your game employs the 4 cardinal directions as control inputs, let the player use the arrow keys as well as the traditional default of WASD. Maybe I’m old fashioned (or just very right-handed), but when I’m not playing a first-person shooter with a mouse, I’d much rather use the arrow keys to move than WASD. Of course, this might require adding more alternative keys for other actions, but people who prefer either configuration will be happy.

Lock the mouse cursor. This mainly applies to first-person Unity games, I suppose. Sometimes, I have reason to play games in a window instead of fullscreen (I know, blasphemy). When I’m doing this, it’s ultra-annoying if the game window suddenly disappears because I inadvertently clicked outside the window onto another one, thus pulling it to the front. Please lock my cursor in the game window unless I choose to alt+tab out.

Escape shouldn’t quit. This is probably the most important thing on this list. It has the potential to induce in the player a rage so great that they may never launch your game again, depending on how far they got before it happened. Please, please don’t make hitting the escape key quit the game. Send me to a pause menu from which I can either resume the game or really quit by hitting escape again or by clicking the option.

Now go out there and make some games. I want to play them all. Happy developing!

Note: The header for this post was created using Nathalie Lawhead’s PRINT_ERROR02

#gamedev