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.
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!
I own my way of doing things. With time, I got to believe in the power of patience for creative work. Ideas have to rest, somehow. Decisions must have taken at their own pace. Often, you take many micro-decisions in a couple of hours. Other times you need a week, or two, to get that “eureka” moment.
If you leave this part to anyone, or anything, you are missing the chance of connect things yourself. If you skip the writing of a huge, complete GDD with all your notes, you risk to get lost along the way.
You need to be a strategic thinker, and for that you need to have very clear the system.
“so, it’s a no?”
It’s a “it depends”. I started using Claude AI only on my personal project, the indie action sandbox Pawtners Case. I am developing it outsourcing Unreal Engine development, Art and first level design. And I am doing this in my way, I have no boss, no publisher, nobody supporting economically the project apart from me.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a project proposal that I still have to share with the team. Big docs are not meant to be shared with programmers and “hey, have a read”. Nobody will, it doesn’t matter if you’re a great entertainer or a poor writer. Still, they are very important for ourselves!
(with “big” I mean “more than 5 pages”)
Now that I got a couple of features and prototypes ready, I feel the need to share it. That is because now I see that they are involved. They need to know more. Before they were just following the lead of their client. Now they are part of this, for real.
So I asked Claude AI to review my document and find me possible areas that could need more detail. And I have to say that I am pretty happy with the result. The software is aware to be a software and it provided me a concise list of things. Many of them are not meant to be in a game proposal to me, so I discarded them. There are two of twenty points, though, that made me thing of small edits here and there.
I could have hired a freelancer to make the same work, but it’s hard to find the right person. I can clearly see the value here. Maybe those 2 points would have been reasons of discussions with the team. And that is valuable too.
I did the job first, and this software helped me with its editing. I am in control of the thing, I am not spinning a wheel and see what it spits out. I am the person in charge all the time. I see value in that.
These days for work reasons I am playing a bunch of simulation games (sims) of different nature. I am making in my spare time a sandbox simulator of a police dog, and then for other reasons I am playing other sims.
They all have a single thing in common, despite belonging to different genres. In fact, immersive sims come from first person shooters, a specific type of action game. Colony sims come from strategy games. Sandbox sims come from adventure games.
They all share a single reason of why Players do love them: they foster the player agency, letting them create their own story.
Everytime I join one of their Discord for research I feel that. Every player has a different story to tell. That is, in my opinion, the single most important motivation for the core audience of sim games. Simulation doesn’t mean simulator, high realism and fidelity (also if some simulation game puts “simulator” in its name).
It means to have many levers to move to create your own story for your friends, Discord, or a livestream.
Yesterday, I got the third prototype for my game Pawtners Case. I have this design pillar, which is called “continuous patrol”. One of the objectives of the ideation stage and pre-production is to decide on design pillars that will guide the rest of the production and launch.
That means that I don’t want to have a main menu. You run the game, you are in the game. Most games do not need a main menu, especially nowadays when loading a game takes so much times and connections.
Also, there is no death condition. You can fall off the level (imagine levels are islands in the sky) and land on the same level again. I am also thinking of minigames to do.
Credits will be integrated into the game, too. You can ignore them, but you don’t have to skip them.
Yesterday I discovered this channel and this specific video by Gavin Eisenbeisz, the creator of the successful horror game Choo-choo Charles.
The man shared useful information about creating a game for streamers. It contains something I have been thinking a lot these days, and implementing in my indie game Pawtners Case.
There is something that PC/Console games should learn from mobile games: you run the game, you are in the game. It is good to welcome the Player into the experience, but often, it gets slow and overwhelming with more than three steps to arrive at the gameplay.
The video features a document containing all the information, in case you are more of a reading person. Enjoy!
A random guy on the Internet used many APIs and web spiders to scrap interesting data. The result is here:
It confirmed something I had been suspecting for weeks. In fact, I cannot say too much but I am working with a client from Singapore on a game that will be published on Steam. The money is moving towards indie and premium, people are running away from free-to-play. At least people that contact me, small and mid companies.
The difference is that in indie you look for originality. You look for an empty space to fill, something new. Indie gamers are people looking for novelty. They like certain mechanics and flows, as everybody. But they want to see interesting mixes of genres.
F2P developers, instead, look for different things. A F2P game starts always from a clone. Then you try to make the +1 innovation, which generally speaking is an improvements towards live operations, that are:
The goal of this is to improve the ROAS (return on advertisement spending). You spend money to bring people in with ads, and you get money from this people, eventually.
Two completely different world, very interesting both!
There is a trending voice on socials that says that “GDDs are not important,” and that “Who wants to read all of that text?” and so on. I am mostly a writer, and writing is important. Not because every piece we write needs to be shared among our team. But because it’s the best medium (and the cheapest) to have clear ideas.
When you learn how to write, you become a better communicator. You can also inspire others with short sentences on a Slack channel. But to arrive at that, you need to write a lot. One of the reasons I have this daily blog is this one.
I am applying to a Spanish government’s fund for video games, and I was faster in completing all the documentation needed because I have written a lot about my game in great detail. And I am continuing to do it every day as I play the build I have.
I like to read again what I wrote 3 months later and see how the game evolves. There are also documents that I want to keep updated with changes. Others that I like to print and have physical. It’s part of my love for the craft.
We are arriving at the end of 2024, and every year, we will get predictions from experts and prizes for the best games according to many different lenses.
Until now, I have seen a lot of AI in predictions, and China is the clear winner of the year. The underlying message seems to be that the industry is moving towards cheaper developments and removing the intervention of humans from simple tasks, at least.
The message is that the big-budget, high-quality human craft is not sustainable anymore, but is it? I think the main issue is greed instead. The idea is that 3-5 people in the World need to get stellar bonuses at the end of the year and grow and grow. This is unsustainable, for sure, not quality. Not craft. Not the participation of people also in simple tasks, which are the tasks that made us seniors.
I do not have predictions, as every year, I am a designer, not a marketer. I am a creative guy, and I accept that it’s impossible to predict anything, the World is made by interconnected systems and tomorrow a plane accident can easily unlock WW3 and disrupt the job market for many years.
But I do have a wish: to see great games coming from my continent, Europe. And I do have a dream to complete my game this year my game Pawtners Case. Wishing and dreaming are refreshing.
I read that gamers spend more hours watching others play than playing videogames on their own.
This inevitably leads to the creation of games that are more fun to show to others. Games that are too complicated to understand or with many fail conditions are penalized. Games are designed not only for players but also for streamers, which are an important driver of sales.
A streamer wants to entertain but also show that he is good. Spending two hours thinking or losing miserably because you made bad strategic choices at the beginning is not the best. This is probably why puzzle games are not so popular on Steam. This is also why RTS games are not trendy anymore, probably.
Streamability depends not just on the genre, but on two factors: