The No Twinkie Database
Even great games can include design errors. Here's a list of things not to do.
These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my "Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!" Designer's Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. I've organized them into general categories. If you want to learn more about one, just click on it and it will take you directly to the place in the column in which I discuss it. And if you have suggestions for more, by all means send me E-mail and tell me about them! Most of these were contributed by frustrated gamers.
A few people have complained that these mistakes are "obvious" -- but if they're so obvious, how come they were in a game in the first place? And why do designers keep on making them?
If you'd rather just read the original columns, you can click on the links below. Everything in the database is in them, except for Bottom-Up Game Design, which gets a column to itself.
Bad Design Practice
- Bottom-Up Game Design (this gets a whole column to itself)
- Incomplete or Ambiguous Design Documents
- Designer Ignorance of Technical Limits
Bad Conceptual Design
- Moving Impossibly Large Chunks of Stone
- Birds That Carry Swords
- Bad Guys With Vanishing Weapons
- Converting an Enemy to Your Side Nerfs Him
- Crates Without Pallets or Forklifts (Stuff in Impossible Places)
- Ignorance of the Law of Communicating Reservoirs
- Adolescent Armageddon
- Kill Monster/Take Sword/Sell Sword/Buy A Different Sword/Kill Another Monster
- Amnesia at the Game's Beginning
- False or Pointless Alignment Systems
Bad Gameplay Design
- Bad, Boring, Boss Battles (several issues)
- Extreme Rule Changes When Fighting Boss Characters
- Puzzles Requiring Extreme Lateral Thinking
- Puzzles Permitting No Lateral Thinking At All
- Puzzles Requiring Obscure Knowledge from Outside the Game
- Many Combinations, No Clues
- Time Limits in Pure Puzzle Games
- Failure to Provide Clear Short-Term Goals
- Failure to Explain Victory and Loss Conditions
- Unclear Reward Thresholds
- Fake Interactivity
- Forcible Gameplay Style Changes
- Poor Defensive Controls in RTS Games
Bad Game Mechanics and Balancing
- No Variable Skill Levels
- Easy Mode is Supposed to be Easy, Dammit!
- Deadlocks
- Too Much Randomness
- Creatures That Can Resurrect the Corpses of the Fallen
- Dead Opponents Resurrected While You Sleep
- Wrecking a Game's Balance for the Sake of A "Cool Feature"
- Dominant Strategies
- Harmful "Upgrades"
- Incorrect Victory Checks
- Illogical Victory Checks
- Out-of-Fantasy Exploit Prevention
- Psychic AI
Bad User Interface/Usability Design
- Bad (or Nonexistent) Camera Controls
- Unplayable Camera Angles
- Seizing Control of the Camera at Bad Times
- Un-Configurable Controls
- Bad Configuration Mechanisms
- Unsaved Configurations
- Unavailable Configuration Menus
- No On-Demand Save Game and/or No Pause Game
- Not Being Able To Save After Fine-Tuning Things
- Your Only Save Is Immediately Before Your Death
- Save Points Before Long Non-Interactive Sections
- Saved Games That The Player Can't Manage Properly
- Games You Can't Quit Out Of
- Offering Irrelevant Help
- No On-Demand Input Device Help
- Obscuring Critical Information Behind Visual Effects
- Uninterruptible Text
- Rapid Non-stop Text
- Uninterruptible Movies
- Movies You Can't Pause or See Again
- Background Music You Can't Turn Off
- Sloppy Shell Menus
- Bad Input Device Conversions
- Poorly-Implemented Rumble or Force Feedback
- Bad Split-Screen Design
- No Subtitles
- Unreadable Subtitles
- Unworkable Interface Elements (e.g. invisible crosshairs)
- Bad Gamepad-to-Mouse/Keyboard Conversions (and vice versa)
- Games Without Maps
- Poor Buying and Selling Interfaces in RPGs
- Small Objects That Don't Stack
- No Loading Progress Bar/Meaningless Loading Progress Bar
Bad Programming
Bad Level Design or Progression
- Boring and Stupid Mazes
- A Switch in One Room Opens a Door in Another Room a Mile Away
- You Have 30 Seconds to Figure Out This Level Before You Die
- Difficulty Moving in 3D Spaces (e.g. having to stand in or select exactly the right spot)
- Invisible Walls
- Excessive Use of Darkness
- Out-of-Sequence Checkpoints
- Overuse of One Location
- Bad Manuals and/or Bad Tutorials (tutorials are a level designer's responsibility)
- Tutorials Widely Separated From What They Prepare You For
- No New Features After the First Few Levels
- Mandatory Wildly Atypical Levels
- Setting the Player Up to Fail
- Teleporting NPCs
- Levels that Over- (or Under-) Use a Game Feature
- Essential but Unobtainable Items
- Grinding
- Forcing the Player to Violate His or Her Alignment Unnecessarily
Bad Content
- Incongruous or Fantasy-Killing Elements
- Yet More Fantasy-Killing Elements
- Plot Inconsistency with Game Mechanics
- Turning the Avatar Stupid or Incompetent in a Cutscene
- Pointless Surrealism
- Poor Acting and Writing
- Garrulous and Indiscreet NPCs
- Neat, Tidy Explosions
- Huge Breasts and Other Juvenilia
- Overlong, Predictable Animations
- Low-Poly Trees (and other models too)
- Too Few Audio Clips for a Given Situation
- Bad Translation and Localization
- Time-Constrained Demos
- Obvious and Cheap Reskins (Cookie-Cutter Games)
- Extreme Changes of Brightness or Sound
- Mocking the Player