Common Game Design Flaws and How to Fix Them
Echoes of Eternity: A Postmortem on Missed Opportunities
“Echoes of Eternity” was supposed to be our masterpiece. Instead, it became a cautionary tale, a monument to the dangers of late-stage refinement and the exponential cost of unaddressed design flaws. This is our postmortem, a raw look at where we went wrong and what we learned about tracking game development progress.
The Vague Genesis: A Core Loop Undefined
Our first misstep was failing to nail down the core loop early. We envisioned “Echoes” as a sprawling action RPG with crafting, base building, and a branching narrative. The initial pitch was exciting, but the actual player experience, the moment-to-moment gameplay, remained abstract.
This meant our early prototypes lacked a clear purpose. We built systems in isolation: a combat system, then a resource gathering system, then a crafting interface. Without a strong central loop to tie them together, these pieces never truly gelled. We should have dedicated more time to iterative prototyping with paper and simple digital tools, ruthlessly discarding mechanics that didn’t serve a clear, engaging player fantasy.
The Economic Collapse: Over-Engineering Leads to Chaos
Next came the economy, a truly spectacular failure. We wanted depth, a player-driven market, and complex crafting recipes. What we got was an impenetrable tangle of currencies, rare resources, and crafting stations. The initial idea of an “organic economy” sounded great on paper, but without rigorous early testing, it spiraled.
Players found it impossible to understand what they needed or where to get it. Merchants offered irrelevant items, and crafting felt like a chore rather than a reward. Fixing this late in development meant ripping out entire systems, which created cascading bugs and shattered our already precarious development timeline. A clear game development log from the start could have documented early economic models and allowed for quicker, data-driven adjustments.
The Narrative Labyrinth: Story Meets Scope Creep
Our narrative also suffered from a lack of early definition. We had grand ambitions for a morally ambiguous story with multiple endings. However, as the game’s core gameplay struggled, the narrative team continued to add complexity, hoping a compelling story would paper over the gameplay cracks.
This led to massive scope creep. Every new narrative branch required unique assets, voice lines, and quest logic. Late in development, trying to simplify the narrative felt like amputating limbs. We burned through resources and morale trying to make disparate story elements connect. A consistent game dev journal would have highlighted these scope creep indicators much earlier, allowing us to pivot or prune before it became unmanageable.
The Bug Avalanche: Late Fixes and Developer Burnout
Attempting to fix these fundamental flaws late in the development cycle was our undoing. Every “solution” introduced new bugs. Balancing the economy meant re-balancing combat. Simplifying the narrative broke quest lines. Our bug tracker became a monument to our despair.
The team was perpetually in “crunch” mode. Morale plummeted. The endless cycle of fixing one problem only to create three more led to severe burnout. We were a team of passionate developers, but the project had become an uphill battle against our own early design choices. We learned that the cost of late-stage fixes is not just time and money, but also the human toll on the development team.
The Echoes of What Could Have Been: Lessons Learned
“Echoes of Eternity” taught us hard lessons. The most significant was the immense value of early, honest self-assessment. We should have failed faster, prototyped more ruthlessly, and embraced iteration from day one. Consistent playtesting with external audiences would have revealed our core loop’s weakness and our economy’s complexity long before they became insurmountable problems.
Documenting our design decisions and iteration process would have been invaluable. Imagine having a detailed game dev journal, a living record of every hypothesis, every test result, and every discarded idea. It would have provided clarity, prevented repeated mistakes, and offered a historical context for why certain decisions were made. For a powerful way to track your design decisions and iterate effectively, start documenting your process now with our game development journaling tool. It’s an essential step towards building a successful indie game.
We now understand that a good game development log is more than just a diary; it is a critical tool for accountability and clarity. It helps maintain focus, avoid scope creep, and makes those early, critical iterations effective. Don’t make our mistakes. Start your game development journey with a clear, documented path.