Play other games before designing your own!!!

Ok so the title is a little dramatic. BUUUUT it's fair.

Story time! (Kinda)

So I'm a developer. Primarily a 3D artist, but I've been made to dabble in more technical areas from time to time. I've also often ended up falling into the gameplay developer role at companies I've worked for. Not literally programming, but more of the person figuring out what should and shouldn't be included, how the game loop should work, how mechanics should interact, etc. I think a big part of that comes from the fact that I've played a ridiculous number of games throughout my life. Probably over 2,000 at this point, and even more if we include Flash games.

One of the leading factors to companies I've worked for failing is the person/boss wanting to make a game, but either not having played games for a very long time or not really playing games at all. So they'll want things that clearly do not work and have been proven not to work in games many times over.

Heck, in my last company, my boss would not let us put camera controls for our 3rd person game on the right joystick. Why? It made him feel dizzy... Despite us trying to show/tell him that the most normal controller setup for a 3rd person platformer is the left joystick moving your character while the right joystick moves the camera.

He claimed that "any normal player wouldn't be able to use both joysticks simultaneously like that and we just think they can because we're experienced gamers."

This was only one example from one boss. I've had many examples from not only many bosses, but also aspiring game developers. For some reason, I'll meet many aspiring game devs who have played like... less than 10 games. Sometimes less than 5 games. Personally, I just think this is crazy. You should get yourself out there and play many games to get a feel for what works in a game and what doesn't work.

Equally, I've also seen the issue on the opposite spectrum. Sometimes people will play a game and demand that a feature from that game be used in the game we're making, despite that mechanic having no place in our game and potentially even breaking other mechanics. They just get overly excited about the mechanic in the other game and tunnel vision onto that singular mechanic rather than actually thinking about how it will work in the game they're making.

Anyways, that's my small rant.

TLDR: Play other games before designing your own. You'll start to recognize pretty quickly what tends to work, what tends not to work, and why, and it'll make your game even better.