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Month: November 2024

What do you do the first day?

Published by Paolo on 11/11/2024

You are a game designer and for the first day you are on a new project. The game is not your idea, it belongs to a company that wants to improve its business. What do you do?

You play, that’s what you do. You play a lot, and you take notes. And you ping your colleagues and try to understand their point of view.

The rest will come, avoid jumping directly to solutions. Good game design is about connecting elements and removing superfluous. In the first stages, the risk is adding too much. A simple technique is to write down a story of a player playing your game from a first-person perspective.

I am going indie!

Published by Paolo on 08/11/2024

Yesterday a client of mine hired me as lead game designer on a new game. I cannot say much about it, but it will be a Steam game, 3D, premium. The game will feature emerging narratives and I will care about the gameplay systems to support that.

Plus I will manage a team of game designers, which is something that I love. I am happy because I am trying to switch sector since quite a while.

Mobile F2P is broken, for now. A total race to the bottom with unrealistic expectations. Plus, the survivors are not looking at the future. They look at the past. They want people ex-<PutFamousCompanyNameHere> to repeat formulas. They hope the dramatic situation with distribution will change someday. It will not. They should look at the future instead.

I was happy to collaborate on f2p projects, but a little frustrated with this way of running businesses. Do you start a race following other runners? That’s wrong in so many ways.

That’s why I am happy to finally work on something truly creative. The expectations are not surreal. I am happy, thank you!

Respect your Creativity

Published by Paolo on 06/11/2024

Yesterday in a post I shared a GDD of a personal project. I found the right collaborators for my case, I thank all the people who helped me.

I edited the message and removed the link, it is no longer necessary to share. You can write to me privately if you are interested, no problem.

I work in this sector with great passion. But one should not confuse passion with professionalism. I love my job, but it is still work, the way I support my life.

I say this because some people wrote me quick messages like “Hi, I use Unreal Engine, I would like to help you with the game. I’ll do it for free.”

I respect everyone’s will to make it out there, but I would never dream of putting someone to work for free on a commercial project.

  • You didn’t tell me who you are and what you do and what you have done
  • You didn’t ask me for details about the project
  • You offered to collaborate for free, giving me a “cheap” image of you.

This is one of the problems of our sector, and if we want to improve it we have to do it “from the bottom”. That’s why I see smart people accepting “technical assessments” that are nothing more than unpaid jobs, in the hope of a position. Then we end up working for companies that don’t respect our work, on projects that don’t go anywhere.

Let’s be serious! I have experienced first-hand the frustration of not having a job and not seeing opportunities. I also cyclically find myself having to review my strategy. But we must never lose sight of the great creative capacity that we all have.

It’s better to work on your shitty project than to work for free for anyone.

It’s better to send a message of “Look what I did, can you give me your opinion?” rather than “I’m looking for a job, help me”.

It’s better to focus on improving your knowledge than showing unfinished projects to others.

I’m the first to not follow this advice. Human consciousness works unpredictably. But it’s still important to share them. I am not a master here, I am just a voice.

Nexflix will close the games department in 3 years maximum

Published by Paolo on 05/11/2024

At long last, I am ready to talk about what I’m doing next: I am working on driving a “once in a generation” inflection point for game development and player experiences using C++. This transformational technology will accelerate the velocity of development and unlock truly novel game experiences that will surprise, delight, and inspire players.  

I am focused on a creator-first vision for C++, one that puts creative talent at the center, with C++ being a catalyst and an accelerant. C++ will enable big game teams to move much faster, and will also put an almost unimaginable collection of new capabilities in the hands of developers in smaller game teams.

Sounds like weird, right? Well, someone wrote the same stuff, but instead of C++, he spoke about genAI. That guy earns more money than me, you, and everyone who will read this post altogether.

The difference is that in my version of the statement I named a technology that actually helped lots of people make fantastic games. This is not the case with genAI, which is a theft created to destroy jobs.

Game making is a creative activity, which means that there are a lot of micro-decisions that we have to make every day. It involves conscience. And conscience is not the result of a set of electric signals, it’s something higher that comes from above. The most powerful processor, or GPU, can create many signals and solve complex operations faster than our brain, but it can never have conscience.

Netflix will shut down its games operations in a maximum of 3 years. If you want to have a more secure/safe job do not work for a company that will fail.

Virality, Virulence, Infectiousness

Published by Paolo on 04/11/2024

A new team of ex-<FamousCompany> wants to “create games worth sharing, with two core pillars – socially engaging games with a word-of-mouth-worthy brand.“

This reminds me of a study I did with two colleagues when I was working at Digital Chocolate. A study on a made-up and also widely abused word: virality.

Virality is a term that doesn’t exist in any dictionary, but two words compose it:

  • Virulence: the strength of the thing’s ability to cause disease
  • Infectiousness: the capability of a thing to spread rapidly to others.

Most of the efforts towards this dream concept, virality, focus only on infectiousness. Invite friends, guild systems, and leaderboards. There are many best practices around that topic and it’s easier to find experts to help you.

You need to focus on virulence to create something innovative. If it were up to me, I would add a weekly internal playtest and a monthly external one. Clear heuristics to measure progress from an engagement perspective.

Again, SDT is the way.