The most common mistake in a commissioned game is not that it is too easy, too short, or too simple. It is that it is too long, and the consequence is specific and bad: people stop before the ending, and the ending is where the personal payoff usually is.
Length is a function of setting
There are really three settings, and each one has an obvious answer once you name it.
Played at a party, on somebody's phone, passed around. Ten to fifteen minutes, maximum. There are people waiting, drinks being poured, and somebody about to make a speech. A game that cannot be finished in one go before the moment passes will be started by six people and finished by none.
Opened at home, alone, on the day. Twenty to forty minutes. Long enough to feel substantial, short enough to be done in one sitting on a day when other things are happening.
A keepsake to return to. An evening or more, and it must save progress, which changes the commitment entirely. This is the only category where length is genuinely a virtue, and it is the smallest of the three.
Getting this wrong is not a matter of degree. A twenty-minute game at a party is a success and a forty-minute game at the same party is a failure, and the difference is not the game.
Why builders always overshoot
Two reasons, and both are structural rather than careless.
The first is that whoever built it is the worst possible judge of its length. They know where every collectible is, which platforms are safe, what the puzzle answer is. They complete their own game in a third of the time a new player takes, consistently, and they calibrate against that. A level that takes them four minutes takes a stranger twelve.
The second is that length feels like value. When somebody is paying for a bespoke game, adding another level feels generous and cutting one feels like short-changing them. It is exactly backwards: another level is the cheapest thing on the menu, and it costs the recipient time they may not have.
The correction for both is the same, and it is watching somebody who has never seen it play it, without helping. That method is in what one person watching can tell you.
Where the personal content should sit
This follows directly and it is the single most actionable point here.
If a game is going to be abandoned, it will be abandoned in the middle. So the things that were made specifically for the recipient must not all be at the end.
Put the recognisable people early. Put the joke about the family holiday in the first level, not the last. Make the first thing somebody sees after the title screen the thing that tells them this was made for them.
A game that says "this is about you" in the first thirty seconds has already done its job, and everything after it is a bonus. A game that saves the reveal for the end has bet the entire gift on somebody finishing, which is a bet that frequently loses.
Length that does not cost the player
There are ways to make a game bigger without making it longer, and they are usually the better answer.
Optional collectibles. Fourteen cassettes in a level where you need ten. Somebody in a hurry finishes; somebody who wants more has more. Nobody is forced.
A score. A reason to play again for two minutes rather than a reason to keep playing for twenty.
Difficulty settings. The same game, three lengths, chosen by the player. Ours does this through configuration rather than through separate builds, which is described in the honest way to build bespoke games repeatedly.
Things to look at. A background full of references costs nothing in playing time and rewards the people who notice.
All four make a game feel larger and none of them stands between somebody and the ending.
What replay is worth
The other measure worth applying is not how long it takes once, but whether anybody opens it twice.
A ten-minute game played four times is worth much more than a forty-minute game played once, and it is far more likely to happen. That is a different design question, addressed in what makes a game worth replaying.
What this means for a commission
Tell us where it will be played. At a party, at home, or over time. That single answer sets the length.
Personal content goes early. Always. It is the cheapest insurance available.
And if in doubt, shorter. Nobody has ever been disappointed that a gift was easy to finish. Plenty of people have a half-played game they feel slightly guilty about.
