I think my word is "flow" for game design, because I think you want your game to flow, and I think you want your game development process to flow. To… - Derek Yu

The best metric for scoping a project is not technical skill, but the scope of the previous games you've finished!

The key to making a challenging game that's not frustrating is to give the player all of the tools that they need to overcome the challenge— and never make it the game's fault that they lost. [...] Roguelikes give you lots of those tools, so even though they're really tough, it's always fun.

As game designers, we naturally gravitate towards order, because we create rules, and we create systems, and we create structure. And those are all things that belong to this idea of order. [...] And so, I think it makes complete sense that as game designers, we would embrace order, and we would be very attracted to things like "balance", things like "elegance" in game design. [But] more recently — and maybe a big part of this is my experience with Spelunky — I've started to rethink that a little bit. And I've started to think more about chaos as the defining trait of game design. Or at least that's something that really appeals to me right now— this idea that we're not creating these ordered systems, but we're creating chaos for the player to find order in.