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Author: Paolo

The studio lie

Published by Paolo on 11/11/2025

Tim Plöger on LinkedIn shared a critique of the glib advice given to laid-off developers: “You got fired? Then start your own studio!”. This message often gets mixed up, confusing the business problem with the craft problem.

Tim, coming from a focus on the structural and financial side of the industry, correctly points out that starting a studio is not the answer. A studio isn’t just about making games; it’s about allocating people and financials, legal structuring, and sales. That’s a different type of work, and often, a recipe for quick failure for someone whose expertise is in pure creation.

The advice tells you to become an Executive/CEO when all you need to do is remain a Designer/Developer. My counterpoint to Tim was simple: “You don’t have money to buy bread? Well, maybe you have it to buy flour and cook your own bread.”

If your job is to design games, your energy should go into designing games. Spending six months, a year, or even two years sending out résumés without a response drains your energies. It is better to do your job every single day than to beg others while your energy wanes.

When you are laid off, you are given a clean slate, a golden opportunity to build the things you need.

Cook Your Own Bread

You have the chance to prove your adaptive insight (your ability to transfer design knowledge across genres). Here are three immediate actions for any designer, artist, or programmer who is waiting for “the next job”:

  1. Stop Applying, Start Prototyping: Turn your application time into creation time. Build simple, fast, collaborative projects. Don’t worry about polish; worry about fun and flow.
  2. Master the Instincts of the Market: Use this time to apply System Thinking. Pick a successful micro-genre (like the recent Friend-slop games) and try to replicate its core loop. Don’t copy the art; map the instincts (Acquisition, Gregariousness, Escape) that make it tick. This process demonstrates analytical skill far better than any résumé.
  3. Join the Flour-Buyers: Seek out other developers who are also “baking their own bread.” Join forces for a focused, two-week game jam or prototype challenge. The goal is not profit; the goal is to keep your creative engine running and generate concrete work that proves you’re a builder, not a waiter.

The best way to get hired is to be actively doing the job, with or without a corporate logo on your title.

Believe, don’t expect

Published by Paolo on 10/11/2025

I spoke with a former client this week about an experiment we ran. The results are good. The concrete indicators, the raw KPIs, show definite potential.

Yet, the project is under fire. Why? Because the team leader, who has to defend the project to business stakeholders every week, told me: “The expectations were higher.”

This is how good games die unfairly.

You execute a clear vision, the indicators are positive, but because they are “not great” or don’t match someone’s projection, the people who only chase numbers pull the plug.

The Fatal Confusion: KPI vs. Goal

This happens because many business owners—many, many of them—confuse indicators (KPIs) with goals.

  • A KPI is a health report. It tells you where you are bleeding or thriving right now. A good CPI or a solid retention rate is a sign that the game’s core has validity.
  • A Goal is the destination. It’s the vision, the human spark that creates something great.

The biggest mistake is treating the KPI as the Goal.

When you confuse the current retention rate with the final vision, you kill the process. You are demanding a marathon runner win the race on the first lap.

Think of every successful game out there: most of them started small. They grew with patience, dedication, and the belief that the spark was there. They iterated, they built, and they compounded their small, good indicators into great results.

ROI Without Understanding is Ruin

People in charge look for their own immediate ROI without being willing to truly understand how creative work, especially game design I have to say, actually works.

Creativity is not a linear spreadsheet. It’s a system of feedback and refinement. It requires room to breathe. When you cancel a project with good, but not great, indicators, you are sacrificing future compounding success for the shallow comfort of hitting an immediate number.

Let’s start the week with a clear intention: Stop letting fear-driven number-chasers kill projects that deserve to grow. Believe in the spark.

Strategy as a creative act

Published by Paolo on 09/11/2025

Martin Walfisz, founder of Massive Entertainment and writer of the Connecting Pixels newsletter, recently hit a crucial nerve: Most game companies have ambition, but no clear strategy.

He talks about how, when he started out, his ambition was just “Explosions must look amazing!“. I see this same pattern everywhere. Most teams are building a feature-collage that relies on luck rather than design. The core problem is exactly what Walfisz identifies: we confuse motion with direction.

Ambition is Easy; Strategy is Courage

Ambition is a resume: “This game will be the best in the world, it will hit X million MAU, and it will have blockchain integration.” Ambition is free. Everyone has it.

Strategy, by contrast, is courage. Strategy is saying NO to the 99 good ideas so you can focus on the one great thing that your game, and only your game, is built to master.

Walfisz nails the essence: “Strategy is about deciding where to become great.”

  • Ambition asks: “What else can we add to appeal to everyone so we can make lots of money?”
  • Strategy asks: “What will we say no to, so we can double down on this one, unique feeling that respects the player’s time?”

Companies fear that choosing a lane will limit their creative freedom. But as Walfisz notes, it’s the opposite: boundaries don’t stifle creativity, they sharpen it.

Success Should Compound, Not Reset

When you build a game purely on ambition, its success is a lottery win. Walfisz points out the high cost of this: “Without a clear strategy, success doesn’t compound. It resets.”

If your strategy changes with every new project you are throwing away the expertise, the audience loyalty, and the pattern recognition you earned on the last project.

Success must become a pyramid built on the cumulative expertise of your team, not a single, isolated pillar of luck.

Look at the example of Landfall, which Walfisz cites: they were self-aware enough to realize their strength was “creating inventive, funny, highly shareable multiplayer experiences.” They focused on that one thing and restructured their studio around it. That is the definition of turning your culture into your strategy.

The 100 hours weeks

Published by Paolo on 08/11/2025

Michail Katkoff, founder of the brilliant Deconstructor of Fun podcast, recently made an uncomfortable but valid point about 996: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six-days-a-week schedule.

He argues that when you’re early in your career, time is your only leverage. You don’t have the pattern recognition yet. The only way to earn that wisdom, like a surgeon or an investment banker, is through sheer, brutal volume. He says you must work hard before you can work smart.

I agree with him. Volume builds experience, and experience is the only thing that separates the dreamers from those who achieve mastery. But there’s a crucial distinction that separates self-sacrifice from exploitation.

Back in 2014, I was staring at a resume with two incomplete projects. I had lost my second job as a game designer. The industry was already demanding a commitment I hadn’t delivered. It was the turning point where I decided: I am going to stay in this industry, no matter the cost.

The cost was high. Achieving what I have now required working more than 100 hours a week. That is the hard truth of earning my space in this sector. I was fortunate to have a wonderful family who provided emotional and financial support; without them, it would have been impossible.

However, I have never accepted working more than eight hours a day for someone else. I have the luxury of being supported emotionally and economically from my family. The story would have been different otherwise.

This is the critical difference:

  • 996 for the Company is often a management failure masked as ambition. It’s an unsustainable practice where you burn your hours and your health to deliver someone else’s messy vision. It’s exploitation, pure and simple.
  • 100 Hours for Yourself is like hard training, instead. It means building your own systems, and your future.

When I was rebuilding my career, I was awake before dawn, spending my days working intensively and alone. I discovered Michail’s podcast, taking notes at night. I developed my own systems, my own frameworks, and my own unique pattern recognition.

I was working for my competence. I was working to build my own gate so that I could one day invite the market in, rather than begging for access. I couldn’t skip the hours and the volume. I am sure that it’s not the only way, but it’s the one that avoids most of the risks.

Designing for the Great Conjunction

Published by Paolo on 06/11/2025

Chris Zukowski, the industry analyst behind How To Market A Game, recently published an optimistic take: indie development is in a “Great Conjunction.”

He argues that a perfect storm is brewing: genres that are “easier to make” are also the genres that Steam players are desperately hungry for. This creates a low-risk, high-upside scenario for small teams to release rapid, viral hits like Friend-slop co-op games or Horror-Casino hybrids.

But simply chasing the “Friend-slop” or “Idle Game” trend is the lazy route. A true designer knows that success is not just about the genre, but the transferability of insight, meaning the system behind the mechanics.

If you are going to take advantage of this “Great Conjunction,” you need to know why these genres are working. You need to identify the core human instincts they are satisfying.

The Designer’s Roadmap: Mapping the Great Conjunction

In my experience, the foundation of every successful game is not the graphic style or the business model, but its ability to satisfy a primal human need.

Here is a practical framework, using Instinct Mapping (the concept of identifying the core Survival and Social instincts a game satisfies) to deconstruct the “Great Conjunction” genres. I am writing a book on this topic, so stay tuned:

Great Conjunction Genre (Zukowski)My Instinct Mapping ProxyPrimary Instincts (The “Why”)The Design Hook (The “How”)
Idle / Incremental GamesIdle GameAcquisition, Rest, BuildingThe player gets a continuous drip-feed of Acquisition (loot/progress) with minimal effort, justifying the Rest (downtime) and satisfying the need to passively Build a growing system.
Friend-slop Co-op (e.g., Lethal Company)Party GameGregariousness, Play, LaughterThe core loop is dedicated entirely to Gregariousness (social connection) and unconstrained Play, with the physics or design chaos used to trigger Laughter. Human interaction is the feature, not the polish.
Horror Meta-GenreHorrorEscape, Curiosity, RestThe challenge (Horror) is driven by the thrill of Escape and the pull of Curiosity (what’s around the next corner?). The ‘Rest’ is the temporary moment of safety (e.g., hiding, a brief safe zone). The Horror-Casino genre simply layers this instinct over Acquisition.
Autobattler / StrategyAutobattlerAssertiveness, Combat, PlayThe player’s success relies on Assertiveness (making the strategic decision) and Combat (the resulting conflict), packaged as a simple, repeatable loop of Play that allows for quick experimentation.

The Formula: Market + Instinct

The success of these rapidly developed indie games proves that players will overlook polish and graphics if the core design loop is tight, fun, and deep.

Your task as a designer is two-fold:

  1. Analyze the Market (The ‘What’): Identify the “hot quadrant” in the Game Business Matrix (Session Time $\times$ Player Interaction) where there’s a confluence of hunger and low cost (like those mentioned by Zukowski).
  2. Design the Instinct (The ‘Why’): Deconstruct what primal need that market is tapping into, and use the instincts (like Acquisition or Gregariousness) to structure your Opening (hook), Core loop, and Closing (satisfaction).

Don’t be a martyr for a years-long art project when the market is begging for focused, fun systems built quickly. Use the Great Conjunction, but design with a framework. That’s how you turn a trend into a sustainable victory.

Beyond your resume

Published by Paolo on 05/11/2025

Companies and investors look at the past experience of a candidate or an entrepreneur to determine if the person is right for the position or investment. This makes sense because you want to reduce risks as much as you can. Having people with concrete experience on something working on that something gives at least the feeling that they can do it well.

In the case of game design, this translates to genres and platforms. Companies look for economy designers who have worked on idle RPGs, for instance. Investors will probably fund ex-Riot people to make a new MOBA game for the US market.

But if you are a real game designer, you can work on different genres. I mean, if you know the basics of problem identification, audience, deconstructing mechanics, and so on, you can work on a platform game for PS5 even if you previously worked on casual match-3 games for mobile. We are not finding the cure for cancer, right?

In most cases, the only way of proving this capacity is alone or in a game jam. It’s hard to be hired by a company in a completely different environment. But the reality is that there are fashions, and maybe that popular genre in your area becomes uninvested, and you have to reinvent yourself.

How to do that? I prefer to start by applying my past experiences to the new challenges. The capacity to adapt insight and look at everything as a system is key. And it is a talent, so you need to cultivate it. I hold a design diary and often take notes of these cross-references and analogies.

The art of discovery

Published by Paolo on 04/11/2025

What is art? To me, art is everything that makes me discover something new. Video games are about fun, and fun is basically discovery. It’s the discovery of some skill we have, the discovery of how a certain story will end. It’s the discovery of a new technology, or maybe the discovery of a new type of appearance or visual style.

It’s clear that video games are pure art under this optic. This includes even games made purely for cash, like gambling games or aggressive free-to-play games. We discover something about ourselves in any case. Of course, that “something” can be bad as well.

New social-gambling game idea

Published by Paolo on 03/11/2025

Watch this video and, if you like it as much as I do, listen to this idea.

Here are the rules:

  • The board is a circle.
  • There are 4 balls of different colors: green, blue, red, and yellow.
  • Balls start with a random speed in a random direction.
  • Every time they hit the circular border, they create a connection.
  • Every time they hit the connection of another ball, they take possession of that connection.
  • When a ball has no connections, it disappears from the board.

Let’s talk about the real game:

The Player Input (The Bet)

Imagine being able to bet on a color. Each bet directly contributes to the strength of the ball. The more you bet on a color, the more you influence its force or mass, the more likely it is to smash an opponent’s connection.

The Reward (The Jackpot)

The final prize will be proportional to the number of links the final remaining ball possesses. This proportion can be explored because there are clear opportunities for jackpots: imagine a scenario where a single color quickly dominates and consumes the entire board’s connection count.

What do we have here?

We just designed a new kind of gambling game. It combines:

  1. Observable Physics: It feels “fair” because you can see the action.
  2. Social Conviction: You are betting on belief, not just chance.
  3. Variable Reward: The proportional reward and jackpots drive engagement.
  4. Minimum Interaction: And players can continue betting as long as the game goes.

We used colors, movement, and the irresistible draw of a collective bet.

Simple game design worksheet

Published by Paolo on 02/11/2025

I saw a Simple Product Design Worksheet the other day. It was a list of questions every designer should ask themselves. Questions about simplicity, honesty, and function.

The questions are brilliant. Believe me when I say that 90% of game developers never ask them. They are too busy chasing the next billion-dollar gold rush or adding features to a prototype that already feels like a collage of ideas. We need instead to stop sending out resumes (our feature lists) and start answering the fundamental “WHY“.

Look at the questions from the list:

  • Who is it for? (“Everyone!” means no one. Find your niche and try to be specific.)
  • What does it solve? (It’s entertainment, not a problem to solve, but you need to find the fantasy to fulfill.)
  • What makes it simple? (Players may quit also for a simple: “The tutorial is just too long, sorry.”)
  • What makes it honest? (Ouch. This hits hard in the F2P world. Are you truly respecting the player’s time, or just hiding the dark patterns?)
  • How does it respect the environment? (I mean the competitive environment. Are you a “follow up” game, or are you offering something that respects the player’s limited attention?)
  • Are you proud of it? (If you’re trying to avoid a low performance review because the vision is messy, the answer is no. And the players will feel it.)

The real gate to success isn’t opened just by a fancy pitch; it’s opened by radical simplicity and genuine pride in what you’ve built for someone concrete.

Game design for modern pyramids

Published by Paolo on 01/11/2025

“The hardest part of making games used to be getting them to work. Now it’s getting anyone to notice.”

I read this interesting post on the current state of the games industry. I spoke about the rock philosophy a while ago, so the post resonated with me. It’s right, the current problem also of game design is getting attention. The technical side of games is easier today thanks to the many tools we have to choose from.

How can you help as a game designer with the attention? The important here is the “invitation to play”. Your art style, the genre (or genres) you are willing to tackle, how do you show them that your game is different (make a trailer before of the game, said Derek Liu years ago), the memorable moments, the goals evidence, the feedback impact… you have lots of tools to use! It’s not just a marketing thing, modern rock teams should avoid silos and think horizontally: a game design choice is a marketing opportunity. Market research drives game design. And so on.