Something Important to Always Remember: You Are Not the Player

Even now, I see that disdain around — for mobile games, casual puzzle mechanics, anything that isn’t ‘hardcore’ enough. The attitude is: ”That’s not a real game. A real game is something I would actually want to play.” I held that view for a while, too. Turns out it’s less of a principled stance and more of a blind spot.

If you similarly look down on casual games, you’ve probably never seriously tried to design one. Designing one will humble you fast. That attitude also has a direct design cost: when you decide a whole category of games “doesn’t count”, you quietly lose the ability to design for the players who love them.

One of the most common traps in this industry is building a game for a target audience of exactly one: yourself. We all enter the field wanting to make the games we love to play. That’s completely...

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