Every gaming business founder wants to reach that milestone. 1M players and counting. So, how do you design for 1M?
You simply don’t. You design for 3-7 people instead. Be prepared for the growth, of course. But good design is a personal thing. Is for someone!
Who’s that someone? When you work for a company, that someone is first of all your manager. You don’t design for players, you design with players in mind. But your client is your manager.
You should first convince her!
I had a baby and I am very happy. I love her so much and met her just 11 days ago. I am on paternity leave.
Being a freelancer, this does not exist fully. I will still support my projects and make new contacts. My intention is to design a game dedicated to her. I am already on it.
With other projects I learned that is better to keep things for me until I have something that I can share and can be interesting for people. Otherwise, my energies may go in wrong directions and I can lose steam.
MDA is great to start, but as you can read on their paper it was created where the games were considered artifacts.
Nowadays many successful games are services, the model should be updated to me.
There are many approaches to game design, but the most common ones are two: “theme -> mechanics” and “mechanics -> theme”.
Sid Meyer is one of the most famous representatives of the “theme -> mechanics” approach. In that fashion, you start from a fantasy, an experience you want to offer to the Players. Then you describe all the mechanics needed to realize that fantasy. Mechanics should offer meaningful choices for the theme to be properly implemented.
Shigeru Miyamoto is a master of the other approach, mechanics -> theme. His games try to find the most engaging and fun mechanics with lots of possibilities. Those games offer surprising twists, using a Japanese technique inherited from drama: kishotenketsu. The mechanics define new in this way new themes. If you look at the most famous games, the theme sounds pretty crazy. It’s because it is defined by mechanics, not the other way around.
What about us? Should we choose one approach and go for it or look for a synthesis? That is up to you, to me the important thing is to be aware of our choice and not leave it to chance.
There is a Brazilian word I learned by practicing Capoeira: mandinga.
Like many words from Brazilian Portuguese, its origin goes up to Africa. The original “mandingueiros” were Muslim literates who compared to other enslaved people knew how to read and write. That’s why they were considered like magicians, almost.
“Mandinga é fazer com pouco, muito!”. Old Capoeira masters speak these words: mandinga is to make a lot with a few things.
This knowledge from the history of our World can be adapted to game design, too:
Put a little bit of mandinga in your game design!
Living as an underdog has its challenges. I own my time, but that income is unstable. I have a pretty austere lifestyle and few expenses. And I live in a place with free healthcare and stuff like that.
Still, I need to get some extra income for bad times. That is why teaching is the first resource for me. I love to teach and I am good at it.
My target audience is students between 18 and 25 years old. And they are on TikTok. That is why I started a TikTok channel. I already hate myself, but the important thing is having fun and connecting with people here.
Wish me luck.
You can buy a plot of land and start planting crops. You may want to build some structure and make changes on the land. You start a new business. Then you may hire farmers to take care of your land and make it grow.
The same is valid for the game as a service business. Often the people who start a game are not the people who make it grow. Often you need a certain type of people to find something new, a new land. But then you may want expert farmers to make it grow.
It’s not that people cannot do both, it’s a matter of will. Creating a brand-new experience requires the ability to spot opportunities and connect the dots. Maintaining and making a game grow requires analytical skills, instead.
Someone says that one thing is to go 0-to-1, and another 1-to-1000.
You have probably seen something like this:
I cannot say that is an universal rule, but it makes a lot of sense to me. So, if I would start a new games company without investors, I will definitely go for GOOD and CHEAP games.
Do you know why companies spend so much on marketing, especially advertising? Because once the game is done, all the effort has been made they HAVE to sell it.
Probably if they would spend more on keeping and growing talents they will have better games and should spend less on marketing. And I am ironic when I say “probably” because that’s for sure.
The more I work with my creativity the more I feel the urge to learn how to negotiate better my conditions. Because a simple design can become gold for someone in the future.
If your manager or client gives you a specific goal, you should be able to think of everything you need to consider your tasks done.
Game design is also design, so that is also solving problems. Frankly, it’s hard to predict precisely everything you will encounter on your path.
Use the help of the AI to improve this part. AI will probably give you lots of wrong information, too. But it’s great to not have to start from scratch.
Try out a prompt like this:
“You are the lead game designer for a new game. [add here more detail on the game]. Your manager gave you 2 weeks to complete a {task}. Write in a table format all the steps needed to reach the goal successfully. Please, use this {columns} format.{task}: tutorial
{columns}: days, tasks title, description, KPI, needs”
(you should edit and tailor this prompt, it’s just an example NOT a template)
When you have the output, work on that table and prepare to make the right promises to your manager/client.
PRO TIP: it’s better to promise 1 thing and deliver 3 than 3 things and deliver 1. Fight for your rights! If you see 5 tasks that you can do in 2 weeks, tell them you can do 2-3. Then surprise them with the rest, in case you manage to be fast! We suck at estimations, and that’s a human feature, not a bug. But the reason for that is for another post.