Making your game general

ITT we discuss how to collaboratively design our games.

The "Custom unique engine" trap:
A typical programmer thinks he has to design his own engine that will be fast, non-bloated and capable of unique gameplay mechanics. It will actually take most of time to debug the engine instead of game it supposed to run.
By using a mainstream 3D engine, you get top-level graphics, best performance from years of optimization, and 99% of possible gameplay mechanics. All of that for free.
And you can start prototyping shit right away, not building everything from scratch.

The "Original Assets make my game unique" delusion: Most players will not care about assets unless they're really ugly(hand-made assets) or detract from immersion. Stealing/Importing/Converting already existing assets is leaving more time to actual coding.

The "Dialogues and Quests are important" idiocy: Most players will not want to play through quests/dialogue more than once, so its essentially a gameplay roadblock that could be minimized at no cost.


The "My game needs cutscenes" fallacy: your game is about the gameplay, not the story. Write a film if you care about cutscenes and ship it as bonus content for the game.
After first playthrough most players skip cutscenes.

The "music adds atmosphere" notion: Its adds bloat. Players will get tired of it and turn it off. Player have their own music players and favorite artists.