Errors and learning

Mark Rosewater is a designer that makes the game Magic: The Gathering. When magic turned 20 years old he went to GDC to talk about mistakes that helped shape the most famous and profitable card game in the world. He shared 20 lessons that Wizards learned over the course of 20 years. It's a card game but can the same principles be applied to level design?

Note: when Mark talks about players he's talking about an average. Not every player is the same and there is variance among the player base.

Part 1, part 2, part 3, Mistakes? I've made a few, Because salt makes mistakes taste great

In each of the lessons I can see how it's possible to relate what Mark Rosewater said to level design.

Lessons by Sam Stoddard, one of the developers of Magic. For people unaware of the difference between design and development in regards to making Magic. Design is about concept. Development is about making that concept a real card, with tweaks to its concept to make it work in the game's environment. There is more than just that, but for now it suffices.

Top 8 lessons I've learned from leading a development team (Wayback machine archive. Sam has left Wotc in March 2019)