On Game Design - Game Design Theory - page 50

also some money out of their wallets in order to check out some of your
ideas. Giving them chores or waiting times is completely unacceptable. If
you have screens that take a long time to load—and by long, I mean more
than a second or so—find a way around it! It's so important that players
not wait that art and programming should be restructured to avoid long
loading screens.
In video games, players' time is most often wasted via no-brainer ac-
tions such as grinding or other false decisions. Level geometry is almost
always much bigger than it needs to be, forcing the player to run down
long hallways over and over again. If your game includes something like
a town with various NPCs (non-player characters) whom you can talk to,
ask yourself what the purpose of the town is. If its only purpose is to buy
and sell items, for instance, perhaps a text menu could replace it. Let the
player get right to the meaningful stuff
Board games are usually a bit more respectful of players' time, due to
physical constraints and the fact that adding wasted no-brainer actions
makes games annoyingly fussy, but there are still examples of places
where they can tighten up. The genre most frequently responsible for
being inefficient is the war game, which tends to have a good amount of
no-brainer actions and maps that are too large. This is done for the sake
of simulation, but if you look at these games through our lens, they come
up short in this area.
Take Nothing for Granted
FPS games have guns. Platformers have scrolling. Fighting games have
asymmetrical forces. Dungeon crawlers have loot. Video games have
achievements, cutscenes, quick-time events, RPG elements, chest-high
walls, combos, etc. People on the Internet debate the characteristics that
make a good boss fight, as though all games are so similar that what
works for one game should work for all (which, sadly, is almost true right
now). One of the assumptions that I dislike the most, and that I think
many indie game developers are guilty of, is that video games should
have jumping. But it doesn't have to be this way: you should start from
scratch and ask difficult questions no matter what kind of game you're
making. Creativity sometimes means being destructive—destroying old
ideas and expectations, and building new ones.
I think that my game Auro is a good example of this kind of creative
destruction. It's a turn-based, randomly-generated dungeon crawler.
When I started designing it, I wanted to make a roguelike game that
was similar to my previous game, 100 Rogues . But soon after I began the