Game design never dos:
- Never have unskippable cinematics. We know you've got great artists, Square.
- Never add things you don't need. Remember, you're spending 8 hours a day for 40 - 100 weeks with this thing. The player very well might buy this game, play it over the course of a Saturday, and never pick it up again. They might watch a friend play it for 30 seconds, and walk away because it's too complicated. It's not the player's life.
- Never bother with "filler." It will only make the game, on average, more boring.
- Never expose options the player shouldn't worry about. "Would you like to turn off texture oversampling and 8x anthropromorphised parallax shaderlings?" "I Wanna Rock!" "Yes, but how do you want to handle your inline shader priority order cue?"
- Never have health packs that damage the player. Seriously. Stop that. Booby trapped crates are a poor way to create risk / reward.
- Never map important game functions to L3 or R3. Congratulations, now the player has to choose between not crouching or getting a sore thumb.
- Never make the player read the manual. We won't anyway.
- Never make the player get to a designated save point before saving. When you've got to go...
- Never make the player reset the machine to do anything. I'm looking at you, X-men on the Genesis.
