Making A Good First Impression
It seems really obvious when you think about it, but part of what makes or breaks a game is our first impression of it. This might be the introduction (if that's what you first see of the game), or it might be the blurb describing the game on a website. If either is bad, you'll probably move on to another game and not even try it.
First impressions make a lot of difference. For myself, I've lost count of the amount of games that I've quit immediately after reading the introduction because it was either poorly written or riddled with spelling and/or grammatical mistakes. There are also an equal number of games that I've never even downloaded because the blurb on the website I saw them on didn't make them sound anything special.
An example of the former might be:
Helo. U are agent 007. it is ur job 2 kill all teh zombees in teh house. If u are it 3 tims you is ded. good luk.
Believe it or not, but that isn't something I just made up to prove a point. It's the actual intro from an actual game. (The infamous Death Agency by Jin if you're interested.) Really makes you want to continue playing it, doesn't it?
And then we have the blurbs on websites that make the game in question sound so bad that it's doubtful anyone will bother downloading it in the first place. You might see something like:
Hi this is my first gam. Its not been tested cos i didnt ave time and its probably not much good but let me know what you think of it. please dont bash the game cos its my first one and it took me an hour to write.
That isn't a genuine example as such, but I've seen a variety of blurbs for games similar to that before. None of which make me want to play the game.
Read the blurb again and ask yourself - is a blurb in which the game's author admits his game isn't much good and hasn't been tested, only took an hour to write, and where he actually mentions it's his first game likely to be a good game? Of course, it could be good but the evidence kind of indicates otherwise. For me, whenever I see a blurb stating that it's the writer's first game, the what I immediately think is "oh, it's bad and he knows it's bad so he's making a point of telling everyone it's his first game so they'll go easy on him".
It's never easy making your first game sound promising, irrespective of what you think about it. You don't want to come across as someone proclaiming his game is the best thing since sliced bread (and risk everyone avoiding it because of how overbearing you, a newcomer, sound), but neither do you want to people to read the blurb to your game and just dismiss it outright.
You also don't want to work on your game for months and months, test it thoroughly, fix all the bugs and errors that come to light, release it… and then find no one wants to play it because the blurb isn't very good.
A blurb should:
* be interesting.
* grab the potential player's attention.
* show your game in as favourable a light as possible.
A blurb shouldn't:
* sound like the writer is apologising for his game (i.e. "this is my first game and it's probably not very good". If even the writer thinks the game is bad, what chance is there that anyone will want to play it?)
* contained spelling mistakes and/or grammatical errors. Seriously, if you can't even write a few sentences without a mistake, what hope is there for your game?
* be overlong. It should be a few lines, a few paragraphs at most. If your blurb is five screens long and is detailing the entire storyline of the game, you've included too much detail.