My Perspective on Video Game Design

Posted 2025/06/01

This is a list of game design rules to follow in order to make a video game that I would probably like. I mainly tend to like video games that are highly accessible and reasonably deep, with an emphasis primarily on strategy and/or tactics in combat. One of the major reasons I like games like this is because I think they tend to give the player less of a false sense of accomplishment than games with other emphases.

1. Winning should depend primarily on strategy and tactics, incl. thinking about strategy and tactics in real time.
2. Games should have at least some significant degree of strategic/tactical depth to them to make them interesting, but they don't necessarily need a lot.
3. There can be a lot of tactics and strategy involved in all types of games, regardless of whether they are in the genres of strategy games or tactical games. For example FPSs often require the careful management of ammunition, med kits, and other resources, and they often require prioritization of enemy targets.

But not very much. It is esp. good to have benefits from these types of things only up until a certain small extent, and then very fast drop-off in the benefits of improving beyond that point. For example, I think it's good if there is a large benefit in being competent at aiming, but not much additional benefit at being better than competent.

1. Aiming. Tends to be an issue with FPSs, esp. PVP FPSs. This is more of an issue with console analog stick controls than with computer mice. This issue can be reduced by:
   1. Keeping enemies close to the player, and giving weapons shorter ranges, so that enemies are larger on the screen
   2. Allowing the player more time to aim, possibly by making enemies move slower or stop frequently or by including time slow-down "bullet time" effects.
2. Reflexes and dexterity. Tends to be a problem with bullet hell shooters and 3rd person action games.
3. Getting used to the controls.
4. Keeping track of lots of things in real time. Tends to be an issue with RTSs.
5. Memorizing maps, weapons, abilities, and other aspects of the game.
6. Reading FAQs and forums and such online. Tends to be an issue with complicated games, esp. MOBAs, survival crafting games, PVP games, and MMOs.

1. Just spending a lot of time playing the game (grinding). Tends to be a problem with MMOs and more recent games, esp. more recent AAA games.
2. Paying real money. Money should buy content for the game, or possibly things that don't impact gameplay like decorations, but not give the player an advantage in the game.
3. Doing anything that is essentialy work. Like keeping track of a large amount of game-related information in a spreadsheet.
4. How well you can keep track of what's outside of your field of view. Tends to be an issue with FPSs, and, to a lesser extent, 3rd person games. This can be worked-around in some of these ways:
   1. Have enemies only come at the player from primarily one direction. Or if they only come from a couple different directions, picking which direction to deal with at any given time can be a tactical consideration. For example, the player could set mines or turrets to cover their back.
   2. Give the player a slow-down 'bullet time' ability, so that the player has enough time to look around while using that ability.
   3. Encourage the player to just keep moving, meaning all the enemies are either in front of the player, or running to try to catch up with the player from behind.
   4. Give the player a fish-eye view. Although this usually doesn't completely solve the problem, and it tends to not look very nice.
5. Controlling the camera well so that you can see what's happening around you. Tends to be a problem with 3D platformers. The work-arounds for the issue of needing to track what's outside of the player's field of view in the item above can also help with this issue.
6. Complicated calculations or complicated experimentation. This tends to basically be work. Tends to be a problem with turn-based strategy games.
7. Randomness. However, randomness that changes circumstances without necessarily being good or bad can be fine, and can be a good way to add variation to the game.
   1. Randomness is also less of a problem if the frequency of random events is greater so that good luck and bad luck can even out in the long run. If the player is attacking an enemy and that one attack determines if the player wins the battle or not, that's much worse than if the player would need to miss a whole bunch of attacks in a row in order to lose the battle.
   2. Also, randomness that multiplies with other randomness, rather than adding can be a problem, even if the randomness is frequent, because a few high or low numbers can still result in a big swing.
   3. Another way to balance out randomness is to use a sort of a virtual deck of cards for randomness, rather than something more like dice. That way over the course of running through the cards, the player will pull all of both the good cards and the bad cards.

1. If essentially the same gameplay can be provided in a shorter span of time, that is better.
2. If some part of the game can be made to require significantly less time, while providing essentially the same gameplay, that is good.
3. Try to allow skipping or mostly skipping parts of the game that many players are likely to not be interested in. For example, in a CRPG, it is a good idea to make it possible to skip almost all of the dialogue and plot and reading, and still be able to play the combat and character ability development parts of the game. Similarly, it is good to make it possible to reduce the difficulty level of combat and character ability development, so the player can quickly skip past that part of the game if they want.
4. Cut-scenes and intro videos, like videos that show the game developer and publisher, should be skip-able.
5. It should be possible to move through dialogue and similar parts of the game very quickly. This is esp. useful if the player has already gone through the particular dialogue.
6. Try not to give the player too much to micro-manage, because this can make the game take a very long time, without having that many interesting strategic or tactical choices. Tends to be a problem with turn-based strategy games.
7. Stealth gameplay is often unnecessarily time-consuming, because the player must often wait to watch the enemies move around in their patrol patterns before figuring out how to sneak past them. And then, the player has to continue to wait for their patrol patterns to progress to the right point in time for the player to move. One way to use stealth in a game while avoiding this issue is to make it so that enemies don't patrol. Instead the player's stealth abilities just limit how close the palyer can get to enemies before agroing them, allowing for closer ambushes, or for approaching the enemies from a different direction. Similarly, stealth can be used to reach places where the player can set traps or hack turrets, etc., before attacking the enemies.
8. Time compression features can often help a lot with this issue for some types of games. For example, older games from the 8-bit and 16-bit eras can potentially be played on emulators that allow the game to be fast-forwarded. That can make grinding, like in JRPGs, fast enough that it is not a problem.
9. Avoid long animations in turn-based games so that they don't slow the game down too much. Including an option for speeding animations way up is often a good way of avoiding this problem.
10. It is important to make the interface fast and easy to deal with, especially in a particularly complicated game. Otherwise the interface can end up slowing the game down a lot.
11. It is also important to make it easy for the player to see relevant information regarding the game, so that the player doesn't need to memorize information, take notes, or use other work-arounds.

1. Try not to make any part of the game very boring. If there is something the player has to do regularly that is essentially just busy work, try to remove it, automate it, or improve the interface so it can be done more easily and faster.
2. Being required to simply walk, run, ordrive from one place to another is often boring, and should be avoided. This is especially a problem when the player is required to backtrack. Fast travel mechanisms can help with this, but if the player still needs to travel for a few minutes to reach each new fast travel location in order to fast travel there later, that can still be boring. Tends to be a problem with open world games.
3. Having to play the game on a difficulty level that is too low to actually be challenging tends to be boring. For example, this tends to happen when the player is forced to grind easy battles in order to level up.
4. Filtering through a large amount of collected items to figure out which are actually worth keeping, like in games similar to Diablo, tends to be boring. Such loot-based games tend to try to handle this problem by showing the most relevant stats for items to make it easier to figure out which items are best. I think a better solution is just to give less loot.
5. Having to spend a lot of time breaking open objects or do similar activities that are required to collect loot tends to be boring.
6. It is important to avoid giving the player too much to think about at one time (analysis paralysis), because it makes the game go slower and makes the game more boring. This is especially an issue in turn-based games and pause-able real-time games. Analysis paralysis can be avoided by either keeping individual strategic/tactical decisions relatively simple or by making the game real-time and not pause-able, so that the player is forced to think in real time.
7. Making the player wander around maps trying to find easter eggs and other hidden things mainly requires the player to slowly and laboriously search every little corner of every map, which tends to be boring.

1. It is annoying to have long instance times, because the player could easily make a mistake early on, and still be paying for it many hours later. Tends to be a problem in turn-based strategy games.
2. However, as long as the player is getting clear feedback on how well they have been doing in the last few hours, ignoring the impact of the player's earlier choices, it can be fine to have a very long campaign or instance that takes many hours.
3. Turning a game into a roguelike can help with this problem, because each run can take just a few hours. Each repetition can potentially unlock additional content, so that there is still an overarching progression, and so that the game's complexity can slowly increase.
4. If someone is not careful with avoiding long instance lengths, in particularly bad cases, a player can end up putting many hours into an instance or campaign, but not be able to actually finish it, because they have too much of a disadvantage from playing badly early on.

1. Balancing the game effectively, like so that all available weapons, abilities, items, etc. are useful, is important and difficult.
2. If a game is not well-balanced, for example, if only a few weapons and abilities are actually useful, that effectively means the rest of the weapons and abilities almost might as well not be in the game. It effectively reduces the overall amount of content and gameplay provided by the game.
3. Bad balancing also makes it more difficult to provide the player with solid feedback on how well the player is playing. For example if two battles should have around the same difficulty level, but the first is much easier than the second, it can give the player an incorrect sense that they played better in the first battle. This can reduce the player's ability to figure out how to improve.
4. Lack of good gameplay balance can turn what would otherwise be a great game into a game that is more of a tech demo or gameplay demo than an actual game. Game developers very often skimp on this part of game development, because it doesn't impact the list of game features they can advertise, or what the graphics look like.
5. Gameplay balancing is often much easier with linear gameplay, because at any given point in time, it is easier to predict where the player will be in terms of character ability development. If the player is allowed to play any battle at any time, then there needs to be some mechanism for adjusting the difficulty level based on how powerful the player characters are at that time. That increase in variation makes the gameplay balancing more difficult. Because of this, I would often recommend tending toward linear gameplay or something close to linear gameplay. Tends to be a problem with open world games. Procedural generation is another way to work around this problem. It potentially allows for many more hours of gameplay, but it is also risky, because it is more difficult to implement it well.

1. It is important to make the game potentially challenging without making it too hard. If it is not hard enough, it can be boring. If it's too hard, the player is forced to replay the same difficult small parts of the game repeatedly until they win and progress, which is also boring.
2. It is important to somehow provide varying difficulty levels for the player to play on. If the game is too easy, some players will simply always win, and if the game is too hard, some players will just always lose. By default, a good way of doing this is to let the player pick a difficulty level to play on at the beginning of the game. It can also be nice to allow the player to change the difficulty level part-way through, in case they find they have chosen incorrectly to begin with.
3. It can also be important to allow more different difficulty levels with a finer granularity of difficulty so that the player can choose to make the game only a little easier or more difficult. Otherwise, you could end up with a situation where the normal difficulty level is too easy, but the hard difficulty level is too hard, and there isn't a difficulty level in between. I find that I prefer to have the granularity of difficulty levels be about twice as fine as what most game developers tend to prefer.
4. Another option for giving the game a variable difficulty level is using the JRPG method where the player can pursue the plot more if they want more of a challenge and the player can grind and pursue side quests to level up to reduce the difficulty level. However, this method can either mean that the player misses interesting side quests if they want to make the game more difficult, or spends a lot of time pursuing boring side quests if the side quests are somewhat boring.
5. When managing the difficulty level, one option is to let the player sort of 'bid' and guess what difficulty level they might be able to handle for a specific map or battle. This is often implemented in video games by offering additional side objectives that the player can attempt to accomplish in addition to the primary objective. This sort of 'bidding' can be annoying because the player has to not only play well strategically, but also has to be good at guessing what degree of difficulty they can handle. To me this seems like an annoying type of mental calculation to have to do, although it is rather convenient and easy to implement for game designers. If the player could have handled a much higher difficulty level because they underbid, or if the player loses because they tried to get that extra treasure chest rather than just trying to survive, I think both of these are pretty annoying. One way to deal well with this issue is survival modes or roguelikes, that let the player continue playing until the player is killed off, and gives a better score, the further the player gets before dying.

1. It is important to give the player solid feedback on how well they are doing in the game. This way they will notice when some strategies or tactics work well and some don't work well, allowing them to improve in a much more focused way. This also means that if they do something particularly well, it will be more notice-able and they will be able to appreciate it more.
2. Roguelike games can indicate how well the player did in any given run by letting the player continue progressing through the game to new areas or scenarios until the player dies off. This is a nice way of giving indication because it is very obvious and when the player finally dies off, there will usually be pretty clear information about what killed the player and how.
3. Similarly, it is important to give the player clear indication of what they should be trying to do within the game. I find sandbox games like SimCity or Minecraft annoying because there is no clear objective. It is nice to give players options for how they would like to play the game and what objectives they would like to pursue, but there should always at least be default obvious objective(s) for the player to pursue.
4. Acheivements can be a good mechanism for providing indication of what the player should pursue in the game while also providing the player with options on what to pursue next. Acheivements can also be a good way of extending gameplay within the game after the player has seen all of the game content. If the player figures out how to beat all of the missions in a game following the usual rules, at least somewhat different gameplay can result from requiring the player to follow certain additional restrictions while replaying those missions, and this generally doesn't require a lot of additional game development.
5. Giving definitive feedback can esp. be a problem for RPGs that allow the player to reduce the difficulty by grinding or pursuing sidequests because there isn't any definite indicator of how well the player is doing. To some extent a player can just look at what level they are at when they finish the game, but that's still not really a great measurement and it doesn't tell the player how well they are currently doing at any point in the campaign. It would be better if the player could get some kind of score at the end of the campaign and also a score at any point during the game that is representative of how well the player has been doing recently.

1. A game should be highly accessible so that it is easy for somebody to get into. It is bad if it takes many hours of playing the game in order to learn how to play the game well and if that process of learning is not fun.
2. One way to improve a game's accessibility is to keep the game simple to start off with and slowly increase its complexity as the player progresses. It is especially important to have either a very short or a very fun process of learning the basic controls and gameplay. One way to slowly ramp up the game's complexity is to unlock content as the player spends time on the game, as the player gets better at the game, and/or as the player accomplishes achievements.
3. It is also important to try to keep the complexity of the game low enough that the player doesn't need to spend lots of time reading forums and FAQs about the game in order to get better at it.
4. There is some benefit to letting the game eventually progress to a very high degree of complexity, esp. for people that end up spending huge amounts of time on the game, but a game can still be very good without that.
5. High accessibility can also help allow people to participate in playing video games who might not otherwise do it, because if the game is very accessible then a player that doesn't play many video games will probably have an easier time playing it and playing it well.
6. High accessibility also helps allow people to play many different games rather than only picking a few games and playing them quite a lot. I think this can more fun for players because they get to see and interact with more of a variety of games and experience more of a variety of gameplay.

1. In general, it is better to fully flesh out existing interesting gameplay mechanics than it is to add additional gameplay mechanics, because if it's not really fleshed out, then the player won't really be able to interact with it. It will end up being mostly just a novelty rather than a real gameplay mechanic.
2. In particular, this makes it important to focus on the core gameplay of a game rather than expanding the types of gameplay that the game offers. This kind of follows the engineering principle that a product should have the bare minimum of parts and pieces to accomplish what is needed rather than having lots of extra parts that provide extra ancillary functions that aren't really necessary. In general, if a game has 2 forms of gameplay that are separate enough that each could exist alone in its own game, it might probably be a good idea to separate the game out into those two separate games.
3. Generally, the core gameplay of a game is the combat system, so it especially tends to be important to flesh out the combat system. As part of this, it tends to be important for other gameplay elements to tie into the combat system, rather than being something mostly separate from the combat system. Tends to be an issue in games with lots of dialogue and plot choices.
4. There are many games, and sometimes most of whole genres that have this flaw because an interesting gameplay mechanic can be advertised and hyped just about as effectively if it is not fleshed out as if it were fully fleshed out. Also, I think players often don't notice how a game is much less fun because a gameplay mechanic wasn't really fleshed out. They see that the gameplay mechanic is interesting and that it's mostly in the game and just assume that it is contributing a lot to the gameplay, when it really isn't.

1. It can be good to make video games co-op or otherwise multiplayer because it can make something that someone would otherwise do alone into more of a social thing. This is especially good for locally multiplayer games because that way people can play together while sitting physically near each other rather than over the internet.
2. It can also be good to have multiplayer options that are online be designed to encourage people to play with the same few people repeatedly so that people can actually make friends rather than just playing with random people they don't know all the time. One way of helping with this is to encourage the game to be played with only a few other players at once, rather than like a dozen or more.
3. I generally like co-op games better than PVP games because co-op games encourage more positive player interaction, rather than negative, and because co-op games can more effectively handle large differences in skill between players. A less skilled player playing a PVP game against a more skilled player can be less fun for the less skilled player because they will tend to lose all the time, but this is not really an issue in co-op games.
4. PVP gameplay can also be less fun than co-op because some types of abilities and gameplay are fun when applied by the player to other characters, but not fun when applied to the player. For example stunning abilities can be very annoying when they are used on other players because once the player is stunned, they really can't do anything for that period of time and they're basically out of the game until the stun ends.

1. A game can be very fun to play, even while having graphics that aren't particularly good.
2. It is important that your graphics don't blend in with each other too much. You should try to use a variety of colors so that the player can differentiate the various types of objects in the game. It is especially important that the backgrounds don't blend in too much with the other objects in the game.
3. If a game is played from a mostly overhead perspective, it can be a good idea to use 2D graphics rather than 3D because it is easier to implement 2D graphics and to get or make 2D art assets compared to 3D. Also, 2D graphics tend to be less processor-intensive. And 2D graphics often look better and are more clear in what they represent because the 2D art is designed to be viewed from just that one perspective where-as 3D models might not really be designed to just be viewed from mostly overhead.
4. It can be difficult to make graphics that look good from overhead because, at least for humanoids, more relevant details of humanoids can be seen by looking at them face-on or even from the side or back rather than from above. When using 3D graphics or 2.5d graphics, there is often a trade-off between shifting the view to be more from the side because that makes the graphics look better or from the above because the player can more effectively see and understand what is happening in the game.
5. There is also a trade-off between zooming the game in vs. zooming the game out. While zoomed out, the player can see more of what's actually happening in the game, but zooming further in makes it easier to show more detail in the graphics, making the graphics look nicer. When using 2D graphics, there is a way to slightly cheat with this by having backgrounds and walls and such that are shown as if they were viewed from more overhead so that the player can more effectively tell where they are, while having sprites and such for characters and units be shown as if viewed from more of a sideview so that they look nicer. When doing it this way, it is a good idea to have collision rectangles for characters encompass the whole sideview image of the character even though this means that characters will effectively be much larger in the vertical direction than they are in the horizontal direction because it is less confusing.

1. It is a good idea to try to avoid giving the player a false sense of accomplishment or other source of false happiness. It can make a person happier in the short term, but seems likely to cause depression.
2. I tend to try to emphasize strategy and tactics, rather than other gameplay elements that winning could be based on, because I think it makes it so that winning at the game at least requires some application of thought and intelligence. If a player figures out what they need to do strategically or tactically in order to play a game better, and completes a scenario or a difficulty level as a result, I think the sense of accomplishment will be less false.
3. Many possible false senses of accomplishment a player could end up with result primarily from just spending a lot of time on the game.
4. Here are some examples of gameplay that I think provides a false sense of accomplishment:
   1. Some games primarily require the development of muscle memory specific to that game, level, or scenario in order to succeed. I think this provides a false sense of accomplishment, because the player didn't need to figure much out to win, it just required repetition.
   2. 100%ing a game seems like it provides a false sense of accomplishment, because it often requires performing a lot of repetitive tasks that aren't directly fun or even challenging.
   3. PVP games give the player a false sense of accomplishment, because they make it seem like winning must be more important if the player is defeating a human opponent. But beating a human opponent at a video game doesn't accomplish anything.
   4. Many games give the player a false sense of accomplishment by allowing them to level up, or otherwise get more powerful in the game, by spending lots of time on it. This seems especially problematic in multiplayer games where the player's character's level and strength is compared to that of other human players.
   5. Survival crafting games, like Minecraft and similar games, give the player a false sense of accomplishment by making it seem like the player is doing something creative by building a house or a home base. However, I think generally doing something creative that is more closely connected to the real world, like drawing a picture or designing a game, tends to be much more creative.
   6. Games that involve a lot of luck can give the player a false sense of accomplishment, similar to the sense of accomplishment that gambling provides. If each time the player plays the game, they can possibly find a particularly powerful item, the player might have more of a tendency to play the game repeatedly, because each time there is that potential for getting lucky.
   7. Multiplayer games tend to function like pyramid schemes to some extent, giving each player the false sense that they could become one of the best players at that game. To make this worse, the top bunch of players tend to spend an inordinate amount of time playing the game. This increases the amount of contact they have with the rest of the players, so an average player will lose a lot more than half of the time.

1. It's often a good idea to try to base a game on another existing game or games. This way your game can be more familiar to players, and, if you are mimmicing a particularly good game, your game is likely to be good for the same reasons. This is probably especially a good idea for making money.
2. Also, if you get part-way through game development and are not sure which direction to go in, referring back to the game(s) you are basing your game on can be a good place to get ideas.
3. I am of the opinion that there are many existing video games with a lot of unmet potential and simply making variations of them that fulfill that potential can result in very good games. I don't think it is necessary to have innovative or complex game mechanics, or cutting edge graphics or physics.

1. It is sometimes possible to effectively increase the length of the game by making extra game play modes in which numbers, abilities, etc. related to game objects like character classes, enemy types, inventory items, etc. are adjusted without needing to add or adjust major assets like art, animations, maps, or engine capabilities. This tends to be an efficient way to add to the available gameplay.
2. It's especially a good idea to provide significant changes or additions to the game for after the player has finished the campaign. But if the player has to replay the entire campaign in order to see only a few new additions to the game, that tends to be annoying. For example, if a game features a variety of characters to play, it is often better to let the player switch characters in the middle of the campaign. Or if a game features a skill tree or something similar, it is often a good idea to let them re-allocate skill points sometimes.
3. It is also often a good idea to allow the player to replay parts of a campaign that the player has already finished. This way the player can replay whichever parts of the game they feel like trying at that moment.

1. Try to keep making and releasing games without necessarily perfecting each one so you can get more practice and more feedback and get used to getting games from concept to complete faster and more efficiently. This is probably also a particularly good idea for the purposes of making money. Avoiding feature creep is important.

1. It's a bad idea to unnecessarily hide game mechanics from the player. The default result is that the player will have to work harder to look up how they work on the internet. Effectively communicating how the game works to the player also helps the player learn strategy and/or tactics more quickly and easily.

Twin Stick Shooters

I've been playing twin stick shooters a lot recently, because:

1. They tend to allow multiplayer co-op gameplay
2. The overhead perspective makes it easy to keep track of all enemies that are close to the player's character.
3. The overhead perspective also makes it easier to aim at enemies. Using a mouse, the player just need to click on enemies to shoot at them, and using joysticks, the player can still usually aim much more easily than in an FPS.
4. I particularly liked these: Assault Android Cactus, Nuclear Throne, Gauntlet (2014), Nine Parchments, Synthetik, Crimsonland, Renegade Ops

Roguelike Deckbuilders

I've been playing a lot of roguelike deckbuilders recently because:

1. There are a couple that I like that I can play on my mobile phone.
2. They tend to be highly accessible, and easy and fun to get into, but also usually allow for a lot of interesting strategy.
3. I particularly liked these: Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Star Realms

Squad-Based Real-Time Tactical Games

1. Could have more interesting strategy and tactics than a twin stick shooter, because the player would be controlling multiple units.
2. But as long as the player only needs to control a few characters at once, and they all tend to be close to each other, it could be much more manage-able than a typical RTS.
3. Similar to games/series like Icewind Dale, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect, Neverwinter Nights, Temple of Elemental Evil, Freedom Force, but with an emphasis on combat instead of plot and dialogue, and without a pause feature in order to reduce analysis paralysis.
4. And similar to RTSs like Warcraft 3, except the player would only control a few characters at once, and wouldn't have to manage resources or build buildings or units.
5. And similar to FTL: Faster Than Light, but not pause-able and with more emphasis on combat, rather than ability development.

Real-Time Strategy Where Can't Control Individual Units

1. Only allowing control of squads or armies of units, not individual units, could make the game much more manage-able than typical RTSs.
2. It would be important for the combat to be fairly consistent, so that the player would be able to understand what is happening in the battles, so that they could adjust.
3. It might also be good to try to let the player zoom in and out quickly, to more easily track everything that is happening on the map at once.
4. It is also preferable not to have too much emphasis on build order, because trying to figure out optimal build orders is often complicated and boring. I think actually being in battles and making decisions in those battles tends to be more fun.
5. Similar to Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns in a lot of ways, but I didn't actually like Kohan that much.
6. Similar to the more recent games Northgard and Dune: Spice Wars, but with much less emphasis on building and economy, and much more emphasis on combat.
7. Similar to normal RTS games and series like Warcraft, Starcraft, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War, Command and Conquer (except Command and Conquer 4), Space Run, Northgard, Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, but without allowing control of individual units in order to make the game much more manage-able.

JRPG Without Grinding and With Better Feedback

1. Similar to old-school JRPGs like Final Fantasy games up through Final Fantasy 10, Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Advance, Ogre Tactics: Knights of Lodiss, Fire Emblem Advance, and Chrono Trigger, but with definitive feedback and much less grinding.
2. The player's object would be to progress through the main plot as quickly as possible, with as little grinding throughout. The game should provide definitive feedback to the player, regarding how well the player has been doing recently, and also so far in the campaign.
3. It would also be good to somehow make the battles the player fights to grind interesting, or to allow the player to move through them very quickly. One option for this would be to only have plotline dungeons and scenarios, but allow the player to reply them with adjusted difficulty in order to grind.

Turn-Based Strategy Highly Accessible and Very Fast

1. Similar to games in series like Civilization, X-Com, Master of Magic, Age of Wonders, Fire Emblem, Master of Orion, but much easier to get into and much faster to play.
2. Need to make them fun and easy to get into initially, and fun and easy to learn.
3. Need to make them much faster to play than games almost always are in the turn-based strategy genre. The primary way to accomplish this is by simplifying or removing parts of the game that aren't really necessary. Another way is by having the computer manage some aspects of the game, rather than the player, but that can cause some odd problems, so simplifying or removing parts of the game tends to be preferable. Combat is often a part that can be easiest to mostly automate in order to save time, because it often consumes a lot of time, and it is often mostly separate from the rest of the game.
4. Try to keep instance times short so that the player doesn't make a mistake early on and then pay for it for many hours after.

FPS or Third-Person Shooter With Less Aiming and Tracking Things Out of Sight

1. Similar to games/series like Bioshock, The Darkness 2, Doom 3, Doom (2016), The Haunted: Hell's Reach, Half-Life 2, Hard Reset, Tribes, Bionic Commando, Helldivers 2, Star Wars: Republic Commando, Gun Metal, but with less emphasis on aiming and keeping track of things outside of the player's sight.
2. Less emphasis on aiming and tracking things that are out of sight allows more emphasis on strategic and tactical elements.
3. In this genre, I tend to like interesting weapons and abilities, resource management (like managing ammo), and enemy target prioritization.
4. I also often like bullet time, because it can help make aiming and tracking things that are out of sight easier.
5. I generally like twin-stick shooters better than FPSs or third-person shooters, but they do usually have better graphics, because things look nicer from a front or side perspective than from an overhead perspective.

Diablo Clones

1. I would tend to like this genre more, but I find the character ability development to be way too complicated. I think it is both complicated enough that doing it really well is basically work, and I think it distracts from the strategy and tactics in combat, which I think is potentially much more interesting.
2. I also don't like having to sort through a big pile of loot to try to figure out which items are actually good enough to keep.
3. In this genre, I liked Darkspore quite a lot, but I also liked Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. I especially liked the tag team feature of Darkspore, where each player brings 3 different characters into each mission, and switches between them throughout the mission.

Third-Person Action

1. Games of this type primarily tend to place too much emphasis on reflexes.
2. In this gennre, I kind of liked X-Men Origins Wolverine, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, because they didn't seem to have much emphasis on reflexes. But I thought the combat in X-Men Origins Wolverine and Prince of Persia: Sands of Time didn't have enough complexity, and I thought it was too easy to become too powerful in Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

Autoscrolling Shooters

1. I tend to like this type of game as long as there isn't too much emphasis on reflexes, but there just don't tend to be very many of them that are made, and a lot of them just aren't very good.
2. In this genre, I liked Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony in particular.

Sidescrollers

1. I like some sidescrollers, but only if there isn't too much emphasis on reflexes and muscle memory.
2. In this genre, I liked Super House of Dead Ninjas, Ranger X, Cave Story, Blaster Master, and Downwell in particular.

Other Top View Action

1. In this genre, I liked Binding of Isaac, Gain Ground, and Demigod in particular, but they are all very different games that I liked for different reasons.
2. Binding of Isaac just seemed similar to a twin stick shooter, so I liked it for that.
3. Gain Ground often involved some significant strategic and tactical considerations, like picking which character to use next, figuring out how to kill all the enemies without dying, and figuring out when to try to kill all the enemies, versus trying to get as many characters out the exit.
4. Demigod was a MOBA game that I liked to play vs. AI. I thought the character ability development for each character was fun and interesting.