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The game is the experience it produces in the player — not the intent in the designer's head. Judge every decision by the experience it actually creates, and let observed player experience, not authorial intent, be the final arbiter.
Wherever the game asks the player to choose, make the choice interesting: the outcome must matter, the best option must not be obvious, and every option must carry a real tradeoff. Ruthlessly remove dominant strategies (an option that is always correct) and inconsequential choices (options whose outcomes don't matter) — both are non-decisions wearing a decision's clothes.
A major source of fun is learning — the pleasure of recognizing and mastering patterns. Design so the player is always acquiring and then mastering new patterns; when there is nothing left to learn, mastery turns to boredom, so keep introducing fresh patterns before the old ones are exhausted.
Sustained engagement lives in the narrow channel where challenge matches the player's current skill. Because skill rises with play, challenge must rise with it: too much challenge for the skill produces anxiety and frustration; too little produces boredom. Design difficulty as a moving target that tracks the player up the skill curve.
Aim for a low barrier to entry and a high ceiling of mastery: the game should be easy to start and understand, yet reward deepening skill for a very long time. Reward both the first minute and the hundredth hour.
Agency is the feeling that your choices author your experience. For it to be real, the player's choices must produce consequences that are legible — perceivable and attributable to the choice. A choice whose effect the player cannot see is, to them, not a choice at all.
Favor elegance: get the most meaningful gameplay from the fewest rules. Every mechanic carries a cost — to learn, to build, to balance, to explain — so a mechanic must earn that cost in gameplay value. When a rule doesn't pull its weight, cut it rather than keep it.
Design for a specific player, not an abstract "everyone." Know who the game is for — what they enjoy, expect, and find hard — and let that knowledge inform decisions. A game aimed at everyone usually delights no one; a game that knows its audience can be sharp, coherent, and loved by the people it's for.
Game feel is the moment-to-moment sensation of controlling a virtual body in a simulated space, made vivid by polish. Treat it as three interlocking layers you design deliberately — control (real-time input→response), physicality (a space with weight, momentum, and collision), and polish (sensory amplification) — not as an accident that emerges from the rest of the game.
The game must register and visibly acknowledge the player's input immediately — ideally on the next frame. Keep end-to-end control latency low enough that the player reads response as continuous with intent, because delayed acknowledgment quickly erodes game feel.
Read what the player meant, not only what they literally pressed. Add small, invisible forgiveness windows — coyote time, input buffering, corner correction — so that near-misses of timing or aim resolve the way the player intended.
Wrap every meaningful player action and game event in immediate, layered feedback across multiple senses at once — animation, particles, sound, camera, haptics. A single input should produce a cascade of response ("juice"), so the game feels alive and the player feels powerful and informed.
On a significant impact, freeze the action for a few frames before resuming. This brief interruption of time ("hitstop" / "hit pause") makes hits read as forceful and weighty far more cheaply and vividly than added animation alone.
Move the camera to sell force — screenshake, kicks, punch-in, recoil — because the camera is a sense the player inhabits, so shaking it makes impacts physical. But dose it carefully and expose intensity as a player-controllable setting: unbounded shake becomes noise, harms readability, and excludes some players.
When realism and feel conflict, tune for the sensation you want the player to have, not for physical accuracy. The goal is a body that feels right to control — not a correct simulation.
How long an action takes to resolve once committed — its wind-up, follow-through, and cancelability — is a primary design lever, not a bug to minimize. Choose the game's position on the axis from "instantly cancelable and snappy" to "fully committed and weighty" deliberately, to serve the intended fantasy and risk/reward.
Identify the core loop — the tight cycle of action, simulation, and feedback the player repeats most often — and make it satisfying on its own, before layering content, progression, or meta-systems on top. If the core loop isn't fun in isolation, nothing built on it will be.
A game designer cannot directly design play — only the rules that give rise to it. Treat the system as the object you author and the player's experience as a second-order effect you steer indirectly, by tuning rules, incentives, and feedback and then observing what emerges.