Flash Game Development

Here is a list of things NOT to do when developing a flash game. I’ve made quite a few of these mistakes myself in my games, hopefully you’ll learn from them.

1. Add loud and annoying sound effects to your game
2. Don’t add a mute buttons so we have to listen to your loud and annoying sound effects
3. Make your game ridiculously hard
4. Don’t put in a preloader
5. Have a confusing menu system

Follow up:

6. Forget to embed all of your dynamic textfields
7. Make a game from a tutorial and submit it without making any kinds of changes
8. Have sloppy art
9. Add Mochiads everywhere (unless you need to load external stuff everywhere)
10. Don’t optimize your code
11. Add a bunch of cool effects that require lots of processing power but can’t be deactivated
12. Don’t fix the bugs
13. Have long animations that we can’t skip
14. Don’t credit the artists of the music
15. Don’t compress the music
16. Don’t give us a clear goal to beat the game (although some games can pull this off)
17. Add glow effects to everything
18. Give us a seizure
19. Make confusing controls
20. Make the screen really really big
21. Make the screen really really small
22. Have a really fast frame rate
23. Make links navigate from the current page, not a blank page
24. Don’t put checkpoints anywhere when you have a long game
25. If you let us save the game, don’t also add an autosave function. We’ll definitely remember
26. Make us buy a “premium version” in order to keep playing the game
27. Make the instructions all text with no explanatory pictures/diagrams
28. Make a storyline without an animation to explain it
29. Make it easy for us to cheat
30. Create an ugly color scheme
31. Make the text unreadable
32. Don’t let the buttons look like buttons, we’ll obviously find them very easily
33. Make us wait a long time to play or while playing your game
34. Host your game on a slow server
35. Don’t fix the typos
36. Make fun of us
37. Very repetitive gameplay
38. Don’t let us pause the game
39. Add pointless features that add a lot of file size
40. Insult our intelligence
41. Make a really long menu system
42. Make us have to navigate through the entire menu system after we lose the game
43. Camouflage the enemies so we can’t see them until we randomly begin losing health or lose the game
44. Don’t put rollOver functions onto your buttons
45. Make gameplay really slow
46. Make loss inevitable
47. Don’t put in a scoring system. We don’t want to know how well we did
48. Make stupid computer AI
49. Deceive us
50. Make the description of the game really short or really obscure

Of course, some games can get away with some of these things. But it’s a combination of all of these that makes us really hate your game.

Source.