I've been a proud member of textadventures.co.uk for about a month and have seen good games, decent games, awesome games, and really, really abysmal games. With that, I have complied a list of five common "sins" of game development that I have come across:

1) Releasing a small, unfinished game at the promise of future content: This one speaks for itself, some over-zealous developer publishes what appears in the eyes of the public an unfinished game full of bugs and holes and promises future content. What was the rush? Imagine if Call of Duty did something like this: "We're going to release the first three levels... and release the rest of the game as DLC..."

2) Red-on-Black/Black-on-Red: Red text does not go well on black backgrounds, much like how black text does not go well on red backgrounds. When you have a font and background color combination that are nearly identical, it makes it frustrating to read. This isn't a personal pet peeve either, this has been covered in numerous HTML textbooks. It looks unprofessional and causing nothing but frustration

3) Gamebook Pages with one line: It speaks for itself as it is both redundant and causes the reader to merely focus on the gamebook hyperlinks.

4) Grammer: your playing a gamebook an you can bearly understand WTF is displayed on the screen. not only is dis annoying, butt they're is nuthin porfessional about it.

5) Gamebook Pages with one hyperlink: In-combination with #3, this is extremely redundant. It is the real-life equivalent of a novel having one sentence for an entire page and having you flip to the next one.

I have to ask: was the misspelling of 'grammer' deliberate? :

davidw wrote:I have to ask: was the misspelling of 'grammer' deliberate? :

Yes.

I'd probably add a number 6 that seems quite indicative of a good deal of the games I've seen posted on the main site:

6) Releasing a tiny, buggy, untested game with no storyline, puzzles or gameplay to speak of, while admitting in the blurb to the game that you wrote it in 15 minutes.

7th Deadly Sin: Long drawn-out arcs of the gamebook that lead to nowhere.

<choose option A>
50 pages of pointless crap(unless it's a comedy)
<back to square 1>