Skip to content

Paolo's Blog Posts

What to do when you don’t know what to do?

Published by Paolo on 17/01/2025

Often it happens that your team is developing what you have defined in your design documentation. It happens that you don’t know specifically what to do next.

I use these moments to play competitor games and engage with their audience. I join Discord servers, lurk subreddits, and so on. I try to keep myself in the shoes of a Player of my references.

The second thing I do is to play the last build or the last code version intensively. As a game designer you need to be aware of what game is coming out.

I also keep ordered single big documents containing everything that has been already defined and implemented in the game. It is very useful to keep track of the vision and its progress.

State of Videogames 2025

Published by Paolo on 15/01/2025

As every year, Mr. Matthew Ball dropped a set of slides containing his takes on the state of the games industry. You can read it here in multiple formats.

To me it’s interesting to read these documents mainly to understand the mentality of business people. But those charts and sentences are fundamentally biased towards the macro. The rational side of the business of making games, the statistics. They ignore most of the other part, which exists and it’s equally important. The intuitive side of games, the art. The “we make this game because we believe that we need to say these things”. That is also what makes games so great.

Also, I do not agree with his call for growth. He says that videogames overgrew the countries GDP and then he says that the industry should grow further? I don’t think so. The industry should become more realist, instead.

Walking the walk

Published by Paolo on 14/01/2025

I haven’t played Indiana Jones for a while and now I feel that I don’t know where I was, anymore. Probably I will quit this game without completing, which is sad because I like it a lot.

As far as I know, very few people complete single player games. You put lots of effort in making a complete experience and only a minority of the few people in the World that played it enjoy it fully. It’s part of the deal with creativity.

Another deal is that a project can fail, no matter if you have enough experience to run it or not. You can be a true expert and still make something that people don’t want. The other day I was watching a live playtesting of an MMO game made by ex-BigCorporate people with no funds. They were asking to support their patreon and stuff like that.

I thought: “guys, are you crazy or something? Put yourselves in this hard project with no money”.

But everyone has a story, they live their and I live mine right?

Mismanagement

Published by Paolo on 13/01/2025

I read an article on Bloomberg written by one of my favourite journalists, Jason Shreier. It talks about some of the things that make a videogame fail.

Mismanagement is the keyword for that article. Mr. Shreier shared the article and the reactions were critical with managers. Which makes sense, managers are responsible for the management.

The piece mentioned also an employee who declared things like: “I spent some days just watching Netflix“.

Is this still a manager responsibility?

As an Italian my ethics at work are different from one gal in Shangai or an average lad in San Francisco. So, take my words are mere opinions.

It is common to be in the situation “I don’t know what to do”. Not everyone has the drive to find always something to do even when nobody sent any task. In complex projects, and videogames are wicked ones, there is always something to do.

Part of me believes that there are no excuses for that behavior. If you are watching Netflix while the company is paying you a salary, you are behaving unprofessionally. Another part accepts that we are all different and one can be a talent, but have not enough drive in some moment.

Mismanagement is not always a fault of managers. It still is their responsibility. That’s why it’s hard to find the right managers for a project.

Design works on forms

Published by Paolo on 09/01/2025

In a perfect world with perfect projects made by perfect people, you make a game only when the vision is defined. In that perfect world, building the game means executing the vision.

We live in the normal World, though, and you see rarely a vision defined at project start. As a designer you encounter a direction that is try to understand what to do.

The best way to serve them and the rest of the team is to make concrete choices and execute them.

While directors are looking at the landscape from over the clouds, designers work on the ground. Game design is making concrete choices on a game, no matter what. From the top they say “yeah, sure, let’s try this but then let’s try that“, and it’s fine (well, it’s not fine, but it happens). What we can do is to execute (if we are allowed to). We should find the “this” to execute and go for it.

I have seen the prototyping as a tool for procrastination. To give something to do to the team while the direction can get that eureka moment. That often brings the teams to a bad track. Many potentially good games weren’t successful because of that.

Prototyping is a tool to find the form. But it can be one of the slowest and more expensive ways of finding the substance. It’s hard to build a vision through a set of prototypes.

Researching and engaging with competitors are the best way to understand the substance. Plus, a lot of patience.

Good news for the ecosystem

Published by Paolo on 08/01/2025

Today’s news is that ex-Annapurna staff is acquiring the Private Division team. This means that Annapurna Interactive (the official one) will continue make “transmedia” things with contractors. Meanwhile, Take Two interactive will focus on live service PC and mobile games.

Win win for everyone. I hope this newly formed team do great things. Especially, I wish they start from small things. I have said this many times, I will repeat it: to me the games industry is like a forest.

And a forest to be healthy needs not only big trees. It needs also the underwood, the little mushrooms. The ants working everyday, the snakes representing a danger. Over the last 5-10 years the expectations from investments and media were just looking at the big trees like Roblox and Fortnite. But for Roblox and Epic to survive, a healthy ecosystem needs also small games. AA games, indie games, instant games. Small games.

I like to write and design all by myself

Published by Paolo on 03/01/2025

I am noticing a trend against LLM platforms, coming from people that enjoy writing, like me. On the other side, enthusiasts explain how the performance improved thanks to these services.

It seems to me a case of beauty and intuition versus rationality and data. And this is something deeper than one can think at a first glance. Over the last decades the discourse around productivity and success got a huge boost. AI fits in this because it helps people build a storytelling that may feel credible with a quick read. And if you are not a creative person, this is a wonder.

There are consequences, on multiple levels. Internet today is a different place than 5 years ago, and I believe this is not right or wrong. It is what it is. I watch or listen anything and first thought is “let me check this has not been auto-generated”. Sometimes I fall in the trap, too.

Will AI boost “productivity”? Well, does it really matter at this point?

The most important resolution

Published by Paolo on 02/01/2025

In this fight for taking back our attention, I started unsubscribing from newsletter and YouTube channels. I don’t have specific resolutions for the new year, apart from those who are always in my life. But I got to a level where I don’t tolerate anymore all this information that I constantly have access to. Maybe is better knowing less, but deeply.

This thing is valid for everything, from professional life to the rest of it. I need to get my attention back from infinite scrolling feeds and silly games if I want to really build a good game. I need to focus on other things of my life, too. So that I will probably stop looking at curves and statistics. I will not listen to industry experts building their stories to sell their brand. Not that I don’t like them, please do not misunderstand. I love that thing!

But I feel overwhelmed by too many sources, images, sounds, slangs. It’s just too much to leave into my mind the necessary space to build my things up. It will probably hurt for a while, but I have too. My mind and also my body are begging me this.

Happy 2025!

Published by Paolo on 31/12/2024

I have lost the password of this blog and I switched PC because I am traveling. That is why I wasn’t writing from a while. I am in Brazil now with my family.

I wish to all my readers a great 2025, with less things but more meaningful.

Someone said “no” to LotR

Published by Paolo on 31/12/2024

The biggest Italian books publisher rejected The Lord of The Rings, many years ago. The first reaction I had when I saw this post the other day was from my belly.


But I had the time to reflect: to me, LotR is a masterpiece, but it has also a strong “personality”. It’s not an average story; you may like it or not for specific reasons.

Imagine to be the person in charge of selecting the best books. Something like this arrives, you read it and you like it. But its personality is very strong, and your role requires you to be cold and professional.

Today I can read these words and think that the decision maker made a mistake. But then I put myself in their shoes and it’s hard to make a decision with something like Tolkien’s book. A modern Tolkien can write tales in smaller formats on platforms like Substack. With nobody predicting if the text could be right for a specific geography.

It happens also with video games, I have to say especially to us game designers. Part of our responsibility is to pitch new ideas for features and mechanics. All companies have people in charge that filter our proposals. This process filters also good things out, it’s part of the game.

To design and produce you often need a sort of authorization from people in charge. These people, like you, make mistakes. The lesson you take can be that this is unacceptable, but often it’s a matter of communication. If something so special like The Lord of The Rings arrives on your desk, you can make errors. That’s why people that get a proposal should be prepared first.

I don’t know the full story, maybe the Tolkien’s agent just sent the book with a note. When you present something, the receivers should know all that from before. In that way, they will feel already connected and familiar to the thing.

Like new writers on Substack, leave crumbs and taste the environment!