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Author: Paolo

I did it, I used the Story Mode today

Published by Paolo on 16/02/2022

I did it. I was tired of challenge. Still I wanted to play the game I am finishing first this 2022. Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order.

I was playing at “Jedi Master” difficulty, but today I realized that my enemy was too strong for my stress of the moment. So that I switched to “Story Mode” (easy) and I defeated it. I did it.

Should a “Story Mode” be present in every game? That question makes no sense. Every game is in a different context.

How do I feel? Well, I feel a little like a cheater, still I had the chance to have a relaxed moment of gameplay in a 20 hours videogame. I do not have too much time to play, every stress I can save is a chance more to complete a game.

So, why not?

the moment I did it at 21:08. Shame on you (for judging me! xD)

World of MMO is changing and I have to accept it

Published by Paolo on 15/02/2022

When I was a young player I used to play a lot to Ultima Online. I played in an Italian shard, with real life friends. Good old times.

You started as a simple peasant with a class and lot of illusion. Then you set your goals. Most of the time I was interacting with other people. That was very interesting to me. Being able to play with a 56k connection. Good old times.

I downloaded yesterday Lost Ark from Smilegate. I don’t know if the product will be successful, but:

  • Loading time is extremely long and the game is extremely heavy.
  • You already have demonstrated (according to the story) that you are the hero. During the tutorial some god says that you are the chosen one.
  • Characters are hyper-sexualized
  • Combat system is all about crowd control, which is cool but you put let’s focus on the beauty and nobility of each monster
  • You have a mount from the very first moment you join the others in the server

Before you had to sweat to get things, now you have just everything. Or, at least, that is the feeling. In fact, it is a free-to-play game and I guess they will cash at some point. For sure mounts, pets and cosmetics.

My trouble is with the game experience itself. You are not the small fish trying to become a hero and then a semi-god. You are already the hero, the chosen one. What are you trying to achieve, apart from showing-off your combos and powers?

Today is Valentine’s day, do you love your job?

Published by Paolo on 14/02/2022

“Love, love is a verb. Love is a doing word.”

Massive Attack, Teardrop

I love my job because in the first place I love to see myself immersed in creating playful experiences. I love this job because I love people who can then play the games I help design. I love this job because I love the people I can talk and work with every day.

I believe that love for a job, as well as love for other things, has a very important component linked to other people. Starting with ourselves.

Today for Valentine’s Day, the day of lovers here, I want to celebrate the love for the people who make my work great every day and therefore myself. I hope that my daily action will improve your life somehow.

I also share the love scene that perhaps contributed most to forming the will to become who I am today.

Vampire Survivors – Small game, well made

Published by Paolo on 11/02/2022

I am completely engaged to Vampire Survivors. Made by few people, it’s a game about power creep. I am totally engaged. Here my last gameplay:

The goal is to collect experience and level up, becoming stronger and unlocking new characters and scenarios.

Tower of Wants

  • I want to kill monsters to get experience
  • I want to get experience to unlock the next power
  • I want to unlock the next power so that I can survive more time
  • I want to survive more time to get more gold
  • I want to get more gold to unlock more characters
  • I want more characters to have new play styles
  • I want new play styles to unlock more achievements
  • I want to unlock more achievements to complete the game

It’s a simple idea, built around a retro theme (Castelvania). I admire people who build this kind of things. It is so smart and make me always thing: why didn’t I made this?

Clash of Clans: Forest Path for Brita

Published by Paolo on 10/02/2022

First of all I dissected the current tutorial of Clash of Clans.

Then I took a deep reflection on that tutorial.

Then I sketched the new Villager: Brita.

Today I used the forest paths method by Alexander Swords to sketch out a new narrative arc for a possible new tutorial. You can find here an introduction to the method.

So that I reflected on what the Player is doing and what the new villager, Brita, should do during the tutorial. My high concept formula is this:

see bigger here

As we said, Brita is a trader and a jewelry maker. She will onboard, teach and reward players. She will manage Gems, Gold and also the five magicians. Her main obstacles are the Goblins who want her gold. Her gold is important to her life, so that she will be pretty distrustful toward the Player at tutorial start.

Then I passed to sketch the narrative forest for Brita, based on that:

see bigger here

I love this method because it directly puts in relationship the story with all activities, resources, obstacles and goals.

The new tutorial story will be a story about trust and confidence. You, the Player, are the new Chief of the village. First thing you will do will be to collect gold! Brita will not like, it’s HER gold. During the story, you will successfully defend the village from the Goblin attack and also demostrate her you can lead your troops.

courtesy of clashofclans.fandom.wiki

The Grand Warden represents the Mages and this collective is very important to Brita. In fact, a new detail on the lore will be that Mages are capable of transforming everything in gold. And, as we said, gold is very important for Brita.

The Player will successfully past a trial given from the Grand Warden itself, and Brita will finally have confidence in the new Chief of the village.

Now we have a concept for our new tutorial, next step is to define it!

Learning from the history

Published by Paolo on 09/02/2022

I learn about game design more from the history of videogames than from podcasts, videos and experts speaking about the next big thing.

One has to really know how things were made back then.

Documents like this one are pure gold.

New aesthetics, dinamics and mechanics for blockchain games

Published by Paolo on 08/02/2022

The discourse regarding new technologies is very polarized. On the one hand, I see a lot of highly skilled people joining the financial gaming movement, games where you can make money. On the other hand, I see a hatred on the part of some people not only for the question itself, but also towards the creators.

For me, attacking those who are trying to create something new is definitely a mortal sin. The creator is a very often courageous person. She may be attracted to easy money, why not. But no one gives us the right to attack the creator. The creator is always the one who drives our industry forward.

In all the online noise, interesting qualities of the games that base a part of the service on blockchain are starting to be defined. Let’s see some of them using the false line of the MDA framework.

Aesthetics

The question of being an investor for me is the natural consequence of the worldwide trend of recent years of being able to leave comments on any detail of anything. If in the future people can also feel like investors in a product, it will be very interesting for a lot of people.

Feeling the real power of helping to start and grow a project is absolutely fun. These hundreds of Discord game channels dedicated to videogames that don’t yet exist prove it. Quite often they have more people talking every day than Discord channels of games that already exist.

The community plays a key role, in the future we will see in companies that these communities will be treated as a separate product.

Dynamics

Understanding how the heck a decentralized gaming system works is complicated. You have to read documents, get information, create virtual wallets and even play a little on the cryptocurrency exchange. This thing is fun!

In fact, the real game is right there. Very often we see games that are bad copies of f2p games. Nonetheless, people go there and play. Obviously the possibility of earning money, but also the fact of fiddling with all these new tools creates fun dynamics that bring people together.

The real game is the marketplace, it is that part that needs to be playfully enhanced.

Mechanics

All data flow is very transparent on these platforms. There is also a very interesting loss of anonymity. It will be possible to prevent some forms of abuse that are committed by malicious players, if they lose their anonymity.

Also very interesting are the mechanics that allow people to be rewarded for contributing to the community. As an f2p game designer that I am, I have heard several times advice from some hardcore gamers on how to improve the economy.

These games will allow players to create their own currencies in the future. This is absolutely sane and interesting from a gameplay standpoint.

Whenever we criticize something, someone can answer us and give us an opportunity to learn.
Every time we attack someone, however, we lose the opportunity to drink from a source.

Best companies know when it’s time to kill a game

Published by Paolo on 07/02/2022

It is dangerous to scale a game with questionable product/market fit because of The Traction Treadmill. Sometimes players show up in your game, and a small percentage of them retains.

You may think it’s time to scale. Just add players, instead of improving your game. And this works, for a time. You can grow fast just by doubling ad spend. Or tripling ad spend.

You have 10.000 players, you buy 20.000 more.

Then a large percentage of those players go away and never returns back. You have to replace the percentage you lost plus buy more players to grow. You lose a percentage of players fast, and you have the budget and funding to replace them- but then can’t keep grow on top!

You may want to optimize your campaigns and spend less per Player. But inevitably the problem will reappear at some point. Team’s morale will do down as options become scarce. Increase retention becomes too slow and complex.

That is why is extremely important to polish your product but also understand when you cannot fix it. Also the best companies in the world know when to kill projects.

Everyone should be involved in playtesting

Published by Paolo on 06/02/2022

Playtesting is a key activity during the development of a game. Any successful game runs playtests often to see how the people react to the game set in place.

Usually in games company, playtesting is an activity performed by designers and product manager. But when also the engineers spend 1 hour of their weeks speaking with the Players (or potential players) they can also understand a lot and improve things out a lot.

Playtesting should be weekly, it should stay in the calendar of everyone. Especially for games as a service.

Design tips for the match-3 mechanic

Published by Paolo on 05/02/2022

Match-3 is one of the most successful core mechanics in the mobile space and in general in the gaming scene. When we look at its history, simple variations and innovations permitted the creation of highly profitable services and the startup of entire businesses. In this article I will make an analysis of the very core of the genre: the match-3 mechanic.

The first thing I notice when looking at the match-3 mechanic is that the set of rules represented are both to define obstacles and goals. It is a simple but very beneficial mechanic, in terms of the economy of the gameplay. In fact, the simple action that activates the match needs a previous cognitive effort to spot at least a possible combination. That presents a challenge to the players 

Flow

Step 1 – Problem

Observation/Analysis: recognize at least one possible combination of 3+ colors in line

Challenge: Cognitive effort 

Design Tip: board and art style directly influence the difficulty of this problem to solve

Step 2 – Make a choice

Choose the first you spot VS look better VS deep thinking

Difficulty: time may add challenge to this part

Design Tip: implementing a hint system changes this meaning directly. Some Players may passively accept any hint. Consider:Kind of hint to give (if any)Choose the right timing for showing the hint OR let the Players access to them whenever they want

Step 3- Goal

Match: Swipe two adjacent tokens

Challenge: Interaction, cognitive effort

Design Tip: during your playtests, be aware of the dimension and sensibility of tokensSpeed of interchangePlayers do not like to make a move and see another.Also, if the move is invalid the common thing is to not remove a movement from the total amount, if the game challenge is based on movements. [Maybe it’s possible to let the time be retrieved somehow, to remove this possible friction.]

Step 4 – Result

Cascade: See your choice rewarded

Challenge: Surprise, combo, doubt

Design Tip: here the speed and the bounce of tokens falling reinforce the sense of reactivity that the Player has. According to the target audience of the specific game (and its theme), this has to be tweaked. There is a black box: Players don’t know which token will be spawned and they will feel curiosity about the next state of the level board. Be aware of this.

Step 5 – New Board Configuration

New Board: The gameplay may wait for a stable condition before giving the control back to the Player.

Challenge: Restart from Step 1

Design Tip: the faster, the better. Avoid too much particles and effects left on the board at  this step.