* Have you played your game through to the end and checked that it can be finished? (Funnily enough, quite a few games I've played are impossible to finish because the writer has missed something out and not even realised it because he hasn't bothered playing his own game.)

* Have you read through all the text in your game to check for spelling and/or grammatical errors? Better still, have you tried spell-checking it? (And don't try to claim that spelling and/or grammatical errors don't matter. They do. This is a text adventure. The spelling and the grammar are the most important things about it.)

* Has your game got a proper introduction for when it's put on the main site? (Believe it or not but "dis is me first game. its prolly preety lame but plese rite a gud review of it" isn't going to go down favourably.)

* Is it a proper game as opposed to something you threw together in five minutes and uploaded a minute later? (i.e. is it more than 3-4 KB in size? If not, don't bother with it. Games of that size are too small to be much good and will be over with before the player has even started to play it. Tackling a game of 20+ KB on your first attempt might seem daunting, but ask yourself: do you want a reputation as someone who writes proper games or someone who just messes around?)

* Have you tested it for bugs? (And by bugs, I mean 'anything wrong in the game'. Can items that are described in the room description be examined? If there's a clock on the shelf, can it be taken? If not, why not? Can the wardrobe be opened? If not, include a reason for why not. Are there NPCs in your game? Can they be spoken to? If not, why not? Does going west from the lake crash the game? If so, wouldn't it be a good idea to fix that error before you upload it?)

* Have you got someone else to test it? (Not 100% necessary but always a good idea, particularly if you're a newcomer and might not realise just how much work there is in making a good game.)

Now all of the above would seem incredibly obvious things to remember to do when writing a game. After all, they're common sense. Everyone does them. Right?

Wrong.

Recently, there seem to have been a spate of bad games uploaded to the main ADRIFT site. Now, by "bad" I don't just mean "not very good", I mean "downright awful. Terrible. Excruciatingly bad. Appalling" and words to that effect. These were games that didn't just have the kind of problems you'd expect from newcomers to the scene – typos, grammatical errors, missing commands that everybody expects in text adventures these days – but games so mind-numbingly dire that it's hard to believe even the writers thought they were any good.

Yet they uploaded them anyway.

Why?

Of course, the quality (or otherwise) of a game is a difficult thing to judge. Particularly when it's your own game. I once wrote a game that I thought, quite honestly, was brilliant. I expected people to heap praise upon it and sing its sheer magnificence from the rooftops. Instead, it just got lots of bad ratings and disappeared without trace a week later and has never been heard of or mentioned since (aside from a few comments by yours truly). It was my first game. At the time it happened, I was pretty miffed at the way my masterpiece had been so unfairly dismissed, yet looking at it later on, when I'd learned a few things about writing games and took on some much needed advice, I could all too easily see the game's many flaws. Things that had seemed so wonderful to me when writing the game now seemed so bad. The 'inspired storyline' I had come up with was actually revealed as something quite embarrassing. The characters were a mess, the puzzles impossibly hard, and the writing veered all over the place in such a way that I winced at the idea I had once thought it was ever going to rock the interactive fiction world. In short, I made a lousy game yet was unable to see it for what it was because it was my game.

Which is a kind of long (and rambling) way of saying that, yes, it is difficult to judge your own games and know whether they're any good or not. What might seem good to you isn't necessarily going to seem good to anyone else. Yet at the end of the day, there's a big difference between a game you've genuinely taken your best shot at, and a game you've written in five minutes and uploaded a minute later.

Which brings me nicely back to the subject of this article: the terrible games recently uploaded to the main ADRIFT site. Now I haven't played them all – several, thank heavens, were deleted before I had the chance to download them; several others I took one look at the descriptions of them – which tended to be along the lines of "dis is me firs gam. Plese rite a review an tell me wot u fink of it" – and decided against bothering with them; several others I did play. And have regretted it ever since. Why any of them were uploaded in the first place is probably one of life's great mysteries.

I don't know about anybody else, but when I see a game description along the lines of "dis is me firs gam. Plese rite a review an tell me wot u fink of it", the first thing I think is "ah, we've got a newbie here who's written a game even he thinks is awful, but he's hoping that by stating straight out that he's a newbie people will take pity on him and say nice things about it anyway". Read the description again. It doesn't exactly imply that there's a great game here, does it? Judging a book by its cover might be a bad idea (the cover, after all, is most likely done by someone else other than the author) but judging a game by its description is a good idea. Bad description = bad game right? Not necessarily, but more often than not when you see a description which reads "dis is me firs gam. Plese rite a review an tell me wot u fink of it", it's a fair bet that the game in question is going to be a complete stinker.

The biggest question here is just why people upload these things in the first place. Are they so eager to release their first game that they're willing to put out something even they know is awful just so they can say "well, I wrote a game"? Or are they just totally incapable of telling the difference between a good game and a bad one? The strangest thing is that quite a few newbies come along with a game they know is bad and yet they go ahead and release it anyway. I even remember someone coming onto the ADRIFT forum a few months back announcing he'd just written a game that he knew was awful but had uploaded it to the main site anyway and was looking for comments on it. What, honestly, did he expect? People seldom heap praise on games by newbies at the best of times; when that newbie has just announced that even he thinks his game is awful, what are the odds he's going to get any decent feedback for it?

So if you're going to upload a game, slip a little common sense into your thinking beforehand. Ask yourself: if this was a game by someone else and you were playing it, would you be happy with it? If the answer's no, then keep on working on it until you would be happy with it. Then, and only then, upload it.