Free book by the team at We Playtest Games
Top 20 Indie Game Development Mistakes
What Your Indie Game Is Getting Wrong (And How To Fix It)
We watched playtesters break more than 1,000 indie games. The same 20 mistakes kept showing up. Most of them aren't deep design flaws. They're small things that take hours to fix once you know where to look. The book ranks them by how often we saw them and shows you how to find and fix each one in your own game.
Why this book exists
Most "make a better game" advice is vibes. We wanted numbers. So we built a pipeline: professional playtesters played each game for a full session and reported every issue as they went. We transcribed every word, ran the transcripts through three independent AI classifiers, and a fourth model to adjudicate. A mistake only counted for a game if at least two classifiers and the adjudicator agreed.
What came out the other side is a conservative, cross-checked ranking of what actually goes wrong when playing indie games. Mistake #1 hit nearly half of every game we tested. Mistake #20 still showed up in roughly one in twenty.
What's inside
20 ranked mistakes
Ordered by how often we saw them across the dataset. Start at chapter 1; that one alone affects half of all games.
The numbers behind each one
Every chapter opens with how many games hit the mistake and how many separate observations playtesters logged about it.
Checks you can run today
Each chapter ends with a checklist you can run on your own build in an afternoon.
Fixes that match your scope
Most fixes are tuning numbers, deleting things, or rewording text. Not engine rewrites or new art.
What "fixed" looks like
Each chapter ends with what a clean playthrough looks like, so you know when to stop tweaking.
For solo devs and small teams
Written for studios of one to fifteen people who can't afford to ship a tutorial nobody understands.
Who this is for
- You're shipping an indie game in the next 1 to 12 months.
- You've watched a friend play your game and felt that specific sinking feeling.
- You've gotten reviews like "I didn't know what to do" and want to know exactly why.
- You don't have time for another 300-page game design textbook.
Send me the book
One email. The download link is permanent and shareable.