Top 5 Ways To Make Nobody Want To Play Your Game

First appearances mean EVERYTHING when you're in the world of Flash Development. If people don't think your game is worth playing at a first glance, they're not going to play it. Are you tired of people playing your games? Just follow these rules and you too can have a game nobody wants to play.

5. My first (insert genre of game here)

Look up the words "my first" and you'll see a page full of "my first" games. Notice how their ratings are all close to two. My first game usually suck. There's two reasons for that. One reason is that if somebody insists on telling people that it's their first game, then they want pity because they know their game sucks. The second reason is that they want to tell people their game sucks so they could excuse their various bugs and glitches.

"Give me a break, guys. It's my first sidewalk!"

4. Create an excessively long title for your game and make half of it not even describe your game and can easily be erased and the message of your title will still be the same.

Again, it leads back to maturity, but this time, it also goes into creativity. If you can't make your title short enough to not be TOTALLY HARASSING, then you're not creative. If you're not creative, your game isn't creative. If your game isn't creative, it probably suck. If you don't need half of the title, then why put it there? It makes people who are thinking about playing your game question your maturity. Either you're too dumb to realize you don't need half the title, or you think everybody at Kongregate is an idiot if that extra half is something that's totally obvious, like the "that's why it's lame" part of the following picture

3. Make the icon for your game a bad .gif, a picture, or something that doesn't represent the game.

Kongregate has icons on games for the purpose of showing exactly what their game is about, or bragging about the graphics. Icons are important things, they're photographic proof of your game rocking. If icons can do that, they can also show photographic proof of your game sucking. You COULD be honest and show a real picture of your game, or you can be annoying and show something that has NOTHING to do with the game. Even more annoying is when you use a picture you found on the internet. What does that say about your game?

What does a picture of money have to do with "click the dot"?

Kongregate allows you to upload a .gif for your avatar AND icon. It usually sucks, because Kongregate has a problem with .gif pictures and strange black stuff shows up on it. Well, it used to. Even without the strange black stuff, .gif pictures shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing, because they usually suck. However, think about DTD's icon. Now, think of it animated. Wouldn't that be awesome? How about Last Stand 2? Dolphin Olympics? Yup, it would be awesome. However, imagine it done wrong. Imagine DTD having that zoom in/out problem most .gif pictures have. Imagine Dolphin Olympics having a choppy .gif picture. It would all suck.

2. Spell your title wrong, in ALL CAPS, in l33t, or make it nonsense.

Developing skills are equal to maturity skills. Look at the highly rated games list. Do you see any games called SONNY or gmcrft or b100n5 t0w3r d3f3nc3 3? Nope! Why? Games with bad titles usually turn out to be bad games. For example, look at the last page of the action games list. How many games are spelled bad there? Half of them? More? Look at this list of several games, can you tell which ones are bad?

Hm.. I think I would rather play Fancy Pants Adventure: World 2 then play something completely stupid like "click da cow" or "O-MY-HEAD". Good games have names that make sense. Sure, it's not the last stand if it's a sequel, and there's no point of the + in Amorphous+, but at least it's not something that seems to come from a mind on LSD like "M3OW.. GRRRR!!" or "THE BEST GAME EVER!!!!" Really? The best game ever? That's totally NOT vague, except it doesn't even tell us what the game is about. Also, the "best game ever" (edit: sorry, that's "THE BEST GAME EVER!!!!!!") is only rated 1.64. Best game ever? More like "THE WORST GAME EVER!!!!"

Note: Don't play it. It's not a game, it's just a loading screen on crack. That is, IT DOESN'T LOAD. The bar just flashes all over the place.

1. Make your game a dress-up game that isn't quirky and/or with bad graphics.

Dress up games suck. What's the point of playing them if they're not quirky? Dress-up games are usually for people who want to get the Developer symbol next to their name and the points from developing a game. Dress-up games aren't really games, they're just a picture of some goth musician or some 5-year old girl for Christmas and stupid clothes that have some lazy startDrag(); code in it. Wow, it takes real talent to make a game as unique and fun as this. Oh wait, did I say unique and original? I meant overused and boring. Most dress-up games aren't quirky enough to be worth playing. Some examples are:

Wow! I can dress up a teenage guy and a "cute girl"! Fun! The bottom two games are the quirky ones. However, Santa Claus dress up has the worst graphics EVER.


This is exactly what I mean about lazy programming. Dress-up games NEED to have good graphics AND be quirky to be anywhere close to good. Dragon Ball Z Dress Up uses the "Make your icon a picture you found on the internet" way to make people cautious about playing it, but it's cool. It has 10 different characters, the graphics rock, and you can actually mix up the clothes. Hooray! It's the rare type of dress-up games! The ones that are actually good!

Who do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Super Saiyan BatMan™!

Part of the #3 text was in #2, so I put it back in #3 and added a new paragraph under the picture in #2.