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Author: 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.

Practices and frameworks

Published by Paolo on 29/09/2022

I discovered recently a great article on how to think in the first steps of the design for a new game. I can’t wait of facilitating some workshop based on this framework.

How to use any framework

  • First you test it with a workshop facilitation. In this way you can understand how the framework you consider is really useful inside of a team. You will see other people interacting with it, which is great.
  • Then you use the framework in question to breakdown and deconstruct existing games, especially competitors.
  • Finally you take notes of all of your learning and create a new framework starting from it. It is almost never a good idea to use a framework in the same way it is. Remember: a specific context and a group of people created that framework, you cannot adapt it to your reality without changes.

Very often we hear about best practices like things we should apply religiously without questioning. That is almost never the case, also because when a practice becomes a best practice, usually it becomes also an old one.

Has “put genre here” died?

Published by Paolo on 28/09/2022

Online discourse regarding the gaming industry is very often monopolized by marketing and business people. Which is normal, since they are “selling” ideas and spreading new and old trends.

What makes me smile often is when I read that a specific genre has died. It is like “hey, everyone! Stop doing this because now people don’t want to play this kind of game anymore.”.

As a designer, anyway, I know that Players look for experiences capable of satisfying fantasies. This has nothing to do with a specific genre. Good games start with an assumption on fantasy. “Be a cat” can be a fantasy (STRAY, an indie game). “Win big at Casino” can be another one (SlotoMania, free to play mobile game). “Dominate your opponent mind” (Chess, classic game).

Starting from fantasy, then you build your actions and mechanics on top. And then you design your economy starting from goals structure. You can eventually add up a setting/world and, finally, the story.

During the process of defining your actions and economy, you should study the market and its trends of course. But I would like to invite you not falling into the trap of riding a trend for the sake of it OR rejecting ideas just because there are not much success cases.

When the market is emptying of a specific genre there are usually a series of reasons. Something that doesn’t work for the most can be a huge opportunity for your reality. Don’t be a follower, write your own story.

A serious doubt

Published by Paolo on 27/09/2022

The other day a friend of mine passed me this message:

“Never until now have people boasted of not having read a book in their lives, of not caring about anything that might smell slightly of culture or that requires a minimum intelligence.

Today’s illiterate people are the worst because in most cases they have had access to education, they know how to read and write, but they don’t exercise.

Every day there are more and every day the market cares for them more and thinks more about them. The media compete in offering content designed for people who do not read, who do not understand, who ignore culture, who want to be amused or distracted, even with the dirtiest gossip.

The whole world is being created to suit this new majority, friends. Everything is superficial, frivolous, elementary, primary… so that they can understand and digest it.

They are the new ruling class, although it will always be the dominated class, precisely because of their lack of culture. And so it goes for those of us who are not satisfied with so little, for those of us who aspire to a little more depth.”

Jesus Quintero, Journalist, writer and presenter of radio and television programs

I work in mobile free-to-play since 2012. I started my journey in video games in 2007, dreaming of joining Bethesda, Bungie or Nintendo. More in general some company that impacted deeply in my personal life with their titles.

Free-to-play is based on a simple concept: you need a huge amount of people playing your game. For that reason, everything should be very smooth. Frictionless. We ignore conflict for the sake of keeping attention and awareness toward our service. People has to stay, everyday, with you. So that an obstacle may frustrate too much someone, and that person will go away. They will churn.

Many free-to-play games end up becoming an escuse to get people’s attention without offering any spark of culture. Without requiring any mental effort. Just come in, it is easy and rewarding!

Investments go towards those products, because they can scale dramatically. They can become profitable business. People doing game with passion, games that make people think, instead, have to fight every month to survive. To pay salaries and their bills. Maybe a YouTuber will take their game and stream it next week. Will someone simplify it for the people? Few people will invest in them, because they do not promise growth. They promise a message to the World.

My doubt today is: what am I doing?

First impressions on the new podcast by Hideo Kojima

Published by Paolo on 08/09/2022

As a great percentage of game designers out there, I really admire and respect Hideo Kojima. He has a big ego, he doesn’t speak one word outside Japanese but still he managed to introduce many innovations to the medium.

The main advantage of mister Kojima is probably also his greatest weakness. He didn’t managed to become a movie director and he adapted many things from movies and books to the games mediums.

Today the first episode of his new podcast was published on Spotify:

I like that he explains exactly WHY he helped creating the stealth genre. It is very interesting to hear his chain of thoughts. He acted like a true designer: he understood a genre (shooters or shooting games) and he had a personal tought on storytelling . Shooters of the time, in fact, had no story. No reason why to kill enemies.

Plus, technical limitations on MSX gaming system made impossible having many shots at the same time. So that Mr. Kojima, starting from a personal thought and using the limitation as creative leverage, created the perfect excuse to eliminate enemies: infiltration, heroism.

I like a lot that, before of answering the question regarding the secret of MGS’s success, first thing he says is: I don’t know. Then he starts to reason. Very humble attitude, hard to see out there.

I would like to wish huge success to this new initiative by Mr. Kojima!

How to build the next Supercell

Published by Paolo on 07/09/2022

I have a secret to build the next Supercell. Really, I have it! Have I ever built a company like Supercell? Of course not, but I mean: we live in the age of suggestions, advices, best practices, influence, likes, follows… So why shouldn’t I write some wise article about how to do things, right?

As any secret, this one is very easy to understand too: stop treating people like children. Easy, right? Let’s see three common ways in which you are treating your people like babies, including before they join your company.

Technical tests and assessments

In some case those are necessary, especially for junior talent or for talent that is switching radically the sector. For instance, passing from free-to-play to AAA. Anyway, if you are hiring a person in his forties please: give me a break!

Our curriculum, carreer and our ex colleagues speak from themselves. We have nothing to demonstrate anymore and we are completely capable of doing the job at a technical level. Do I really need to show you how I structure an economy in a spreadsheet? Do i really need to demonstrate my presentation skills? Do you want me to create a flow and a wireframe? Or worst, a single GDD bible? Please, I do this since probably before you joined that company. Again: give me a break!

Do this instead:

  • Interview for cultural fit
  • Review in detail past experiences
  • Ask for referrals of ex colleagues and employers

When I see a test proposal I just think: “ok, you are not capable of evaluating my kind of profile. Next.”

Show me the next things to do with no context

I remember when I was a little dude asking to my father: “Why should I do that?”.

“Because I say so”, was his answer.

35 years later, history repeats. And I am very tired of that. You give a task and a deadline, with no perspective. I will do that for you the best I can. I swear. But I will never understand anything like this. Why is this important for the project? And how will we demonstrate that in fact it was? When we shoud have some learning? What about the past iteration? How did it go?

Maybe you are too busy to explain well the vision behind any choice. That means that you are not doing the job you should, to me. Because if you are my manager, you should be focused on manage my team and myself. Not the game. Not the code. Not the art.

Put your hands on my work

This is tipically something that you do to game designers. And tipically something that occurs in small-mid sized companies. We spent weeks designing something, researching, getting the problem right, sync with all the people involved. And then you decide to change everything because you have your own idea in mind. You are the founder or the leader of the project and you have the last word.

I could be wrong and you right, of course. Still, you are stealing my opportunity to learn more about the audience and the kind of product we are doing together. I just feel that my solution will never be tested on the field. Your solution maybe can be successful. And probably you will be happy and still will recognize my work. But you stole my opportunity of seeing a design I made going out there.

Stop play with my toys, those are mine!

Push your boundaries

Published by Paolo on 06/09/2022

I see a lot of professionals getting a name in the industry working on successful projects. Then they decide to go indie. And they do the exactly same thing they were doing at the mother company, but with less resources. After a while, they return back to some corp. Classic.

One of the things I always suggest to the people I mentor is this: do not remake things you already did before. I am not sure it is the right way of thinking, honestly. It is just mine.

To me, remaking stuff is always a mistake. Maybe the thing you want to remake is an old experiment that failed for some reason. Learn from it and do something else, don’t try to take shortcuts or you will repeat other errors you did for that same experiments that were eclypsed by the major errors.

If a project was successful, instead, it probably was for a bunch of reasons. It wasn’t just your work and effort, but also the timing and the context of that time. If you decide to invest your time and effort for a new project, try always to push your boundaries instead. It is usually a better choice.

Being loyal

Published by Paolo on 05/09/2022

Year ago I was running a very promising free-to-play project in a local incubator. It was very promising, it was the future. My lead artist said: you are inventing the devil. Of course, it was just in my head. The project had no chance to go forward, because I wasn’t being loyal to my will of creating a new company around it.

Being loyal with ourselves is not just to maintain the promises we make. It’s not to respect the compromise. Is also to make well our numbers. If you want to build anything and we consider ourselves game designers it is necessary to stop and think well to all costs and scopes of the things we want to build. And then add a 20% of error to all of that. Otherwise we will most probably fail.

My project failed at many levels, but the main one is that you cannot start a free-to-play ambitious project without great professionals and lot of money behind. The art of giving games for free is very expensive, needs a good monetization strategy and the acquisition of new Players requires huge efforts.

I am glad that I didn’t invented any devil, and I am glad to be here happy telling you those stories.