If the player has to squint, the system is not finished
A system the player cannot read is a system you will misread too. Clarity belongs in the same list as the rules.
There is a moment in every systems-heavy game where the person who made it says the game is deep, and the player says they cannot tell what just happened. Both can be right. Depth that does not read is a private joke.
Readable at a glance means a stranger can tell, in about a second, which pieces are theirs, what is dangerous, and whether the last action worked. It does not mean the game is small. It means the picture stays honest when there are a lot of pieces.
A few tests beat a style conversation.
Hide the tutorial and play for two minutes. Where did your eyes go, and were they right? If you needed a log window to know the state, the log window is doing the game’s job.
Turn the effects down in your head. If the feedback only exists as screenshake and a particle, add a change in shape, colour, or number that survives a screenshot. Pause on a messy frame and look at the still. You should still know who is winning.
Try the squint test. Take a screenshot from the busiest moment, shrink it to the size of a postage stamp, or blur your eyes. The player character and the thing that can kill them should still separate from the background. If two shapes merge into one blob, they are the same object as far as a tired player is concerned.
Colour needs a job. Yours, theirs, neutral, warning. Then stop inventing new jobs. A fifth colour for “special, but not a warning” is how the warning colour stops working.
Numbers need a home. If currency, health, and ammunition all float in the same font in the same corner, they are one number pretending to be three. Separate them by position before you separate them with a paragraph of explanation.
This is a production rule as well as a taste rule. A readable game is faster to debug. When a system breaks, you can see it break. When everything is a similar sprite with a similar particle, you will add print statements and call it a mystery.
Watch someone else play, and say nothing. Every time they ask “what was that?”, write down the frame. Three of those questions are worth more than a week of your own opinion, because you can no longer see the problem. You already know what everything is.
None of this asks for a complicated pipeline, a realistic art style or a large team. It asks you to decide what the picture is for. The picture tells the truth about the rules, quickly, including on the frame where everything goes wrong.
