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Paolo's Blog Posts

Vision and clocks

Published by Paolo on 23/10/2025

Recently, I was hired for a gig as a fractional leader on a new genre. The team was skilled and talented, and the environment was fantastic. Also, the vision was clear, and my client was very creative. Without even noticing it, I worked lots of hours—much more, actually, than the hours I billed.

Some time ago, I was working on another project with a different client. The vision was messy and definitely not based on anything apart from personal opinions. The team was split across multiple projects, and the goals weren’t clear. Someone told me on a Monday, “I wrote you the whole weekend over Slack, where have you been?” And I answered, “I’m sorry, I don’t work on weekends.”

I believe that crunch is a systemic issue in our industry, and since we have pipelines, it’s avoidable. However, a team truly aiming for success will always have certain members willing to work extra to contribute to a good project. If someone asks me to work more, I will probably be reluctant. But when I feel I want to, I am happy to work extra hours. Things aren’t always black and white.

Collage of features

Published by Paolo on 22/10/2025

I met a colleague yesterday who is working on a project with no clear vision. Because of this, plans are constantly shifting, and prototypes are discarded just by pointing a finger to the sky. There is no one accountable for the game’s vision; the Creative Director is the company founder, and of course, he cannot be fired. The game feels like a collage of features, not a proper, cohesive experience.

I told him that this is very common, and it’s one of the main reasons behind the failure of so many games. Someone years ago said that 80% of games never see the light. This is why: you don’t have a clear vision of the experience you want to deliver. You only decide on the genre, and then you add, “but we’ll make it more casual,” without even intensively playing those kinds of games. You aren’t connecting with the audience. You aren’t willing to embark on the creative journey for real. So, you end up trying out things, making one prototype, not properly evaluating the results, and then moving on to something else—like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Maybe something will stick, and in rare cases, you might even get lucky and make some money. But that is not the way you build long-lasting, billion-dollar games.

Resist and persist

Published by Paolo on 21/10/2025

Perseverance is critical to staying competent in game design and in the business in general. Making the choice to enter the industry might be easy at the start—games are cool, and we all love them. But you’ll face resistance sooner or later: turning points and real obstacles to your choices.

That’s when you have to show up, put your soul into it, and demonstrate perseverance. Somehow, I consider resistance a kind of grace. Because without it, one would never prove their real commitment to something.

Things get harder when you’re working on a personal project. Aside from all the actual questions about the game you’re making, there are external pressures and survival doubts: Will I make it? Then you connect with people and discover easier opportunities to pick up. Working for others releases a lot of the stress you have when working alone.

That’s why it’s important to set concrete goals, every 6–10 weeks. These are checkpoints to reach, helping you ignore the sirens’ calling and trying to resist. I have seen people make incredible things in 10 weeks if they have a clear purpose. And if you persist and resist, the reward is something that will be with you forever: competence.

Motivation and performance

Published by Paolo on 20/10/2025

I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed the absence of a couple of friends. I met one of them on Saturday, and he’d been laid off from the company where he used to work. He explained it was due to a low score on his performance review, and then he was out in the next round of layoffs. Now he’s going to take a break; he got a decent severance and can take the time to reflect on what to do next. He looked tired and somehow older.

His partner was with him, and she was worried about the instability of the games industry. She told me that she doesn’t know what he should do. Her eyes, though, suggested that the answer lies outside of the industry. And yes, if you look for stability, games are probably one of the worst fields in tech nowadays.

Performance reviews are fundamentally biased. First of all, I’ve always noticed certain affinities within companies that inevitably lead to better reviews. Second, we are not cyborgs (at least, not yet). You join a company for a specific project, and then you are moved to another one you don’t really like. But a job is a job, and you have to go on. Then you witness questionable choices or no choices at all being made. And you are expected to stay there, with energy and motivation, performing.

Well, to me, it just doesn’t work like that. Performance reviews should be normalized by taking into account the real motivation of teams toward a project. Very often, especially big companies embark on odysseys to basically copy existing success stories. That is something that brings entire teams down, and of course, there are casualties—people who simply cannot continue working as before on something they clearly don’t believe in.

This friend was one of them. I know it because last year he told me something like, “The project is clearly going nowhere, but you know: it’s a job.” Which is the normal thing to think when they put you to work on something you don’t believe. You cannot just refuse to employ your mind on that game that is going nowhere. You have to push, but if the forces abandon you it’s not your fault.

Think multiplayer

Published by Paolo on 19/10/2025

Games as a concept were born multiplayer. Single-player video games are a relatively new concept, and now we’re even seeing the rise of single-player board games.

When you’re sketching out ideas for a new game, you might think single-player first. That’s because it’s hard to deliver a high-quality multiplayer game with a low budget. So, you naturally focus on stories, builds, gameplay beats, and so on. And that is great; my favorite games are like that. I’m used to playing my games alone, in my studio.

But games as a concept are multiplayer per se, so it’s not a bad idea to also think about an online version of your beats and narrative. The best common denominator, if you want to avoid too much struggle, is “to be goofy together.”

I leave you with this video on the Evolution of Online Worlds by Raph Koster. What? You don’t know who he is? Do your work, buddy.

The AI Counter Wave

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 18/10/2025

Our relationship with AI is still very much in development, like our relationship with other technologies, it will be shaped by time and usage. Take our smart phones, we seemingly can’t live without it, but school and parents seem to try and keep our kids away from them – at least for a while. AI is a different beast all together, but pros and cons are discussed daily everywhere. It seems that the technology is fundamental and it already affects many peoples lives.

It seems there’s a double standard that many are not aware of they possess. For instance, I noticed how recruiters and managers seem to praise AI in their work. Summarizing batches of resumes, auto filtering great from good candidates and offloading batches of work to optimize their workflow. AI is great! But when candidates use AI to write the perfect cover letter, create position based resumes and extraordinary motivations, recruiters and managers seem to hate and automatically deny the application. This is a double standard where the technology seems to be both great and very bad at the same time and in many cases this double standard isn’t felt by the person who possesses it.

But I think this double standard provides a clue to what the counter wave of AI will be. I believe all things come in pairs of opposites. Light and darkness exist only in relation to each other, like noise and silence, like chaos and order. AI will create a zest for CounterAI, the deeply personal, the things that exist because of effort and human suffering. The recruiter and managers that make their work impersonal and soulless by using AI to sift through their candidates demand heartfelt personal motivational letters and carefully crafted resumes with a clear human touch. AI will expose the need for humans to grow through hardship, suffering, commitment and purpose. Like microwave meals make you hungry for your mother’s favorite dish, so to will AI make you hungry for the purpose full and human.

I believe in bootstrapping

Published by Paolo on 17/10/2025

Investors will look for 2x, 5x, 10x, 50x, or maybe 100x returns on their investments. So, if you want to secure funding for your game, you should aim for big revenue numbers, or at least make investors believe that your game can make $500M to $1B or more.

On the other hand, when you build a team, it’s better to start step-by-step, gradually building up your skills by releasing small games and then becoming big. But this sustainable model is hard to sell to investors.

So, we have a paradox: you need money to pay your people and make games, but by promising a billion dollars, you put yourself in a position that’s hard to sustain. Furthermore, if you pitch a billion-dollar game, you need to convince your team to make the best possible game, but with an unimaginable objective.

I personally prefer bootstrapping, but the struggle there is finding the right believers. Because, in any case, you need them.

Surrender

Published by Paolo on 16/10/2025

Whenever you’re struggling with a creative problem, there’s a specific moment when you feel you desperately need help. Today, it’s very easy to find software that supposedly assists with just that. You prompt your need in a chat, and the software mimics a human expert and gives you advice.

Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.

Frank Herbert, Dune

In that very moment, however, you have already lost the battle for creativity. You will have surrendered your uniqueness to a probabilistic algorithm that will spit out something random, and more importantly, something common and average. In this Age of Average we’re all living in, you’ll probably feel like you’ve solved your problems.

But you’ve lost because you gave up.

Today is a good day

Published by Paolo on 15/10/2025

Yesterday under the shower, I had an “eureka” moment. Now I can continue with a project I had put on pause, because I have a new vision to work on. This breakthrough was possible because I put hours into studying a tool– a completely different kind of task. My mind started connecting the dots, and after a couple of “let’s try this…” attempts, I got it.

I am happy; now I have renewed energies to work on this.

The Console Business Has an Accessibility Problem

Published by Paolo on 13/10/2025

When I started playing games, the controller was a simple D-pad and two buttons, A and B. As I grew, the industry added more buttons and sticks. Today, we have at least 21 buttons, two sticks, and a D-pad.

What if you’re a kid just starting to play video games? Today, you have to choose between a complex controller or a mobile game like Roblox, where your friends probably already are. Maybe they’re on Fortnite, in which case you’ll still have to learn how to use the controller.

But let’s face it: it’s harder than before. On top of that, add all the time you “lose” by waiting for your game to appear. It wasn’t like that before; you inserted the cartridge and got the game immediately on screen. No need for loading, connecting, updates, and so on.

In my opinion, the console business needs to understand and fix this accessibility issue if they truly want to improve their market reach.