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Month: October 2022

What if mobile AAA is possible?

Published by Paolo on 12/10/2022

Today I woke up with this simple question. Maybe it’s just me wanting to work on something different than simply think in engagement, retention and monetization mechanics. Which is typical in mobile free-to-play.

I am 40 years old now and I grew up with consoles and PC. Industry experts say that immersion is only possible on a sofa looking at a TV screen. I feel really immersed with my right hand on a mouse and the left one on WASD.

Teenagers today, anyway, have always a device in their hands: the mobile phone. They are immersed in social activities and networks and they spend almost 10 hours per day swiping, liking, sharing and so on.

I hear often that mobile players look for engagement, not immersion. Still I believe that great adventures like the games we play on console can be possible to achieve on new mobile devices.

What if the time is now? Maybe the average age of hardcore players is gone up only because teens prefer to interact with another device.

Or maybe it’s just me.

The MVP Culture

Published by Paolo on 11/10/2022

Over the years I have learned the single thing that product leaders hate most: uncertainty. There is a common myth of epic leaders capable of having a solid vision to spread across their team. It is almost never the case. Usually the game vision is the result of team effort.

During the development of a new game or a feature for an existing game, there are a lot of variables that make the people feel uncomfortable and insecure regarding the return on that investment. Which is why the MVP, minimum viable product, concept has been rented from the startup “fail fast” culture.

You develop the basics of that new implementation and with that you measure the results. In theory, you will eliminate risks.

In practice, instead, often that way of producing things shows a lack of vision and understanding of the market. I saw many times the MVP converting to the final product. The team publishes the MVP of a new features, metrics and analytics seem OK and they pass to the next MVP without putting the right effort to make that feature really awesome. 

This is a short term strategy that never works. Games are a refined craft that require passion for the details. That is where the magic happens.

MVP are useful to:

  • Test the technical context and make proper development estimations
  • Have something practical to show an idea to the upper management
  • Run playtests with some cohort

MVP are NOT the right thing to do if you want to:

  • Run split test with engaged cohorts
  • Prove the growth potential of a new game
  • Estimate the LTV improvement on the long term

Designer VS Author

Published by Paolo on 10/10/2022

A game designer is the facilitator of the act of game design among a team. Everyone in a team participates actively to the design of the game. From the producer to the junior QA, everyone is making the effort of delivering a great experience to the Players. Which is to design a videogame.

A friend of mine made me this question today: what if you make a game alone? Are you still a game designer?

I answered him: no, you are not a game designer. In that case you are an author, which is different.

He insisted: but you are designing a game, right?

Yes you are. Making a game alone is game design, too. In that case, all the work is on you. You are not facilitating the act of game design among a team.

To be a professional game designer ready to work for companies you need a completely different set of skills. You should be able to:

  • Understand the business goals translating concepts like scope, budget, KPIs to the gameplay
  • Being able to inspire your team analyzing and breaking down other games and by preparing specific proposals
  • Create and maintain well written documentation so that the vision will be the less ambiguous as possible
  • Run playtests and undestand the pain points of your game. Being able to translate that insight to all stakeholders.
  • Be present in a lot of meetings often facilitating creative workshops.

All of those things are different when you are making a game alone. Which is why I differentiate a game designer from an author. An author is a game designer, but can be a bad teammate. A game designer is a facilitator, but can have not the right talent to make a game alone.

If you want to work for a company as a generalist game designer prove your ability to work in a team. You will unlock a lot more possibilities!

Stadia and Cloud Gaming

Published by Paolo on 07/10/2022

Stadia was killed by Google. Cloud gaming is still alive and well in services like Microsoft Game Pass. Google put cloud gaming in the center, selling the idea of cloud gaming as a revolutionary platform. Microsoft instead put cloud gaming in the right place: as an added feature for a great service.

Cloud gaming is a very interesting features. I ask myself when Valve will also adopt it. I have a lot of friends with MacOS willing to play the same games with other friends with PCs. Cloud gaming would be a great add to Steam.

Cloud gaming is not the future of videogames, thou. Until now, in fact, there is not a single scenario in which Cloud Gaming offers something better than classic Console/PC gaming. Usually performances are better on console. Also, people who cannot afford best devices usually has access to worst Internet connections too. So that the market for pure cloud gaming is very small.

Cloud gaming is a feature and not a platform.

For juniors, with love

Published by Paolo on 06/10/2022

If you are Picasso, you can share just two lines on a blank page and the people will feel the meaning of your art. I ask you: are you like Picasso?

I write this because junior game designers willing to join the industry often do this: they share uncompleted things or just some capture with a game engine opened and two blocks in the Scene. This is NOT how you show your talent to the World out there. This is noise, ego and insecurity.

I know you are struggling because it is very hard to get a job as junior. Believe me, I lived the same years ago. You want to get noticed by recruiters and maybe managers and CEOs. Sharing the first draft of a level means that you opened the engine and you put blocks in a scene. Just this.

  • What’s your reasoning behind that level?
  • The beat sequence?
  • What are the design goals?
  • The mechanics involved?

I can see nothing interesting in those posts.

The worst happens when social challenges like Blocktober appear. I am completely in favor of those challenges! I took those challenges in the past and I will probably take them in the next future who knows. But the results of those challenges are not something worth sharing on a professional network nor on your portfolio. Those are for you to improve, not for the others to see. If you are junior you should work hard everyday on your talent. Do not complete tasks just for the sake of showing off.

I did the same, years ago. It meant nothing. Believe me.

With true love,

Paolo

People like us

Published by Paolo on 05/10/2022

I hear at almost any meeting and occasion to speak about game design people’s personal opinion. To me this is not clear. I like when I do this and that happens. When I see something like this I feel angry. And so on.

That is because we naturally relate with people like us. Fact is that people like us are a myth. A utopy. Each one of us is unique and we have our tastes and behaviors. Which makes our job as designer so interesting.

Instead of referring to people like us it is better to think in missions, journeys and more in general activities that those people like to do. People who like to run with their dogs. People who play chess with friends on thursday afternoon. People who only eat vegetables.

That is where the most interesting things are considered.

Games and stories

Published by Paolo on 04/10/2022

I am taking a course on game writing and learning the hard way how a game can live and be successful without a story. Games do not need stories.

When gameplay and story marry well the story can boost the experience for it be remarkable and memorable. This is because play is a problem-solving activity, useful to improve some of the skills useful to survive. Stories instead help us understand better people and how to relate with them. Games are about things, stories are about people. This is why is so hard to link a game with a good story.

Point of touch among design and writing is that designers look for fun. And fun is a feeling. Writers look for feelings. You can easily spot there is an interesting overlap.

How to analyse any game

Published by Paolo on 03/10/2022

When you work as game designer for companies you will invest a lot of time studying other games. The best thing you can do is to prepare and evolve a personal framework to optimize this job. This post is to detail what I would focus my efforts on.

Specializations

Game design is a huge word, the word for a container. Jesse Schell writes that game design is “the act of deciding how a game should be”. As you can read, everyone practices that. We, game designers, are facilitators of that act.

To me, game design has four main specializations:

  1. Level design
  2. Narrative/Content design
  3. Gameplay/UX design
  4. Systems design

If you work as a generalist, you should focus on all four. If you are a specialist, it is still good having clear the relationships and overlaps with the others

The Experience

The most important thing for a game designer is NOT the game. Really, it isn’t. The game is a medium to an end. And that end is called: EXPERIENCE.

We can write a book only on this term, but for the sake of the article it is important to mention that we game designers should be able to understand the experience of other games under two lenses:

  1. what is the intention behind them
  2. what does them say actually

Understanding the intention is a matter of dealing with lots of analysis, but nowadays developers publish a lot of content. My suggestion is to watch videos and read articles and hear podcasts to try to spot all that’s possible. Playing the game completes everything, and it is very important to play it deeply. For example, if you are really analysing a free-to-play game you should also buy something to understand how it feels.

In order to really understand what the experience says, the best way is to take notes on everything related with your specialties. And when I say everything I mean absolutely everything.

  • Record all game sessions and take screens
  • Copy all texts, level maps and try to empathize with those designers
  • Create documentation and be detailed.