I start creating games where I was very young and create tons of small games as a amateurish game developer and two commercial games. I seen a lot of other beginner game developers that do same mistakes I did when I start with games and this is why I create list of five basic recommendations and hope that this tips helps to others.

1. Don’t aim too high
Many beginners want to create the ultimate FPS or MMORPG that can compete games from professional studios. Don’t do that and I recommend you don’t start working on FPS, RTS and similar genres: people will like the “Big” games instead of your clone.

2. Focus to small addictive games
Start creating small addictive games. Create simple game play with few unique features. Don’t forget on some score system. Users like to beat other players or ourselves.

3. Write concept document
Don’t starts creating your game until you write all of yours ideas to any document, although small games don’t required formal design document, some kind of idea list in notepad is great help. Don’t add new ideas to your games during development.

4. Play similar games
Find and play as many similar games as you can. That give you more expertise in your field and you can avoid the worst things that do your competition and find some great features that you can implement to your games.

5. Find team members
Game development is very complex area and nearly nobody can expertise all parts of work. Someone is great programmer, artist or game designer, but I can’t remember to a lot of people who can do it all in good quality. And you can find another advantage of having team members: game development will be much funnier with some other guys.