Some time ago I tried an experiment. I hired some people to try to teach them my way of making video games. My goal was not to earn money with those games. I wanted to train a couple of assistants because the number of clients of my consultings is increasing.
The experiment did not go as expected. My time is scarce, so I can’t invest it in training people. I quickly realized my choice was pretty dumb. However, I realized something very important.
If we don’t have time, it is better to delegate to those who know more than us. We will thus make a good impression on our clients. We will also learn new techniques.
In my dayjob I use a lot: Google Suite, Unity3D, Python, Github (and git in general) and a bunch of tools more such Slack, Discord or Machinations.
I work into the cloud, so that every document and every simulation or concept or prototype I produce is instantly available from everywhere.
Those are strange times, anyway. We cannot take the Internet for granted forever.
What if tomorrow you cannot access to the GDD you were workin on? What if you cannot pull the last commit from your devs? Can you work offline for, let’s say, a week?
Probably it’s time to return back to the Office Suite too…
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:
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:
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.
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!
In this second part I want to write on what I experienced personally during the tutorial experience. It is very important to write down notes for a game designer.
If you have no time for that, you have no time to learn.
The game welcomes you with the main view of the Village. Here the Player can already decide “this is my kind of game” or quit. The welcome is given by the Villager, one of the two characters introduced in the tutorial. The girl has changed visually:
Her expressivity has become more exaggerated and her proportions are nearest to the beauty standards. I preferred the old one, since she reminded me more of a tough and rude viking. But I get why this one was selected: especially on a small screen you need to emphasize gestures and expressions.
The first mechanic is introduced. The tutorial makes you build a cannon to defend from a goblins’ raid. The sequence is pretty memorable. The goblin is fun and informal, but uses sophisticated words and spells correctly. The animation after the build, which is an idle mechanic with its rewards per se in the game. The defense mechanic is not completely introduced to the Players. Players will learn it alone later simply by playing and discovering they can tap on graves to earn some extra elixirs. Which is pretty smart!
Just after, the Player learns the attack feature and all of its mechanics. A group of 5 wizards join your village and you can use them to get revenge with the goblins. First of all, I believe that wizards are chosen because they are narratively meaningful. In fact the Villager has explained that your village is built on a Ley Line, so that your buildings will auto-repair. Magic is on the air. Second, wizards are pretty fast destroying buildings which is great to keep the tutorial shorter. Last, wizards are a kind of troops that a Player can unlock later in the game. So that the Players can get a hint of future unlocks and test two troops during the tutorial (later, they will use the barbarians).
The third part of the tutorial puts its focus on the importance of building and improving your village. I believe that the Developers, after giving an hint on the possible thrills and best moments, considered proper for the Players to really learn the core loop deeply. The Player builds 5 important resources, completing the core loop five times. It is more than enough to learn the basics of the game.
The tone of the Villager is very formal, and that is when I want to work for personal exercise the next few days. I believe that this part hasn’t aged well and I would like to improve it as an exercise. Many clones of this fantastic game popped out and also many evolutions are at the door. The next successful game can be possibly based on this masterpiece. Especially for new players, I believe that the Villager is a character which should have a more relatable personality. Messy, complicated and interesting. Just like people in real life!
The 2022 tutorial ends with one of the newest features of the game: challenges and rewards. The overview is too fast and based on skipping dialogues, more than actually learning something meaningful like in the first part. Which makes the tutorial experience ending with many questions. This can be interesting for newbie Players, especially for the most hardcore part of the audience that can perceive suddenly that this game is not linear but deep.
When the Players return into the SHOP section, they will find the first offer which is the third builder. No pop-up, no constant prompts looking for no-brain conversions. The value is there. During the tutorial you entered the SHOP enough times and now you know that the SHOP is critical to the experience. You will find the offer and, if you want, you will convert. That is what I call: treating Players with respect.
This weekend I want to do an experiment, the first series of articles. This one is dedicated to one of my favorite games of all the times: Clash of Clans. The purpose of this post is to share my way of breaking down the tutorials of the games I play.
Being scrappy is OK
There is a simple process you can follow, it takes a work day more or less:
The first two columns are the report of every dialogue step by step
Then I detail the feature (or mechanic) the game wants to teach every step and the action needed to pass to the next step
I take notes on narrative. The character speaking and the word count are important for the translation budget. The dimension of every script, in fact, depends directly on the number of characters speaking and the locations used. You can check out this masterclass on short stories.
Finally, I put my bias into commenting on the narrative, assigning an intensity score to every beat and focusing on the tone. For reference, I left the list of tones in a separate tab. The list is taken from this article.
Intensity score goes from 1 to 5, and:
Already seen, not exciting
New thing on screen, still not exciting
Interesting
Cool surprise
Thrill
It is just a personal valuation useful to me to see where I would like to improve the things!
One of the first book I have read to learn game design is one of the best books ever made: The Art of Game Design, by Jesse Schell. I find it the perfect balance between inspirational and practical book. That is why I always suggest start from this book, and some other one.
In one of the first chapters there is a tetrad that the author shows to explain the four main pillars of any game (not just video game):
I still use this tetrad combining it with the classic application of the Pareto’s principle: a new game should be 80% some existing game plus 20% novelty.
Where do I search for the novelty?
I always start from the experience and the feelings we want to give to the Players. Once is decided, generally it is easy to spot the best pillar to innovate on.
Maybe we just want to bring a specific game genre to a new platform. Let’s focus on technology. King is making billions just on this simple concept. They were the first in bringing the match-3 experience to mobile phones with a shared progression with Facebook. Technology was their strength.
Often, we just want to focus on a specific mechanic to bring the same story to the same audience. That are what indie developers do many times, for instance with the game Baba is You.
Maybe we want to create the next roleplaying game? It’s not necessary to invent new mechanics and combat systems, those can just be improved on existent titles. We may want instead find a great story to tell. It is what Horizon: Zero Dawn brought to the industry.
A game can be very successful also if we just amaze the Players with beautiful visuals and sound FXs. Look at GRIS and the beauty of its art and music, for instance.
Before you put your hand on the engine of choice and design your level, or even think in the level itself, it is good to have a beat chart prepared. In this way you can have a big picture of the result of the level design iteration.
The most common way of doing that is by using the most important tool for game designers: spreadsheets.
Prepare a sheet with the following information
Level: the number of the level in the sequence
Skill Atom: what should the Player learn/practice/improve in this level?
Minutes: how much time should the level last from start to finish in a perfect scenario?
Difficulty: what is the fail rate percentage of this level for an average player?
Skills: Core, Secondary, Obstacles and so on. Color those cells to represent the presence of old and new skill atoms in the level
Author: Who is in charge of designing this level?
Comments: after each iteration the other level designers can leave comments here
Improve your design abilities adapting this writing method by Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin Franklin was born poor and he stopped being educated when he was 10 years old. He developed a method of self-education and became great at writing informative texts. Here there is his method:
“I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”
Can this be adapted to game design?
Try this:
Find good videogames and make hints of every interesting part you see. Start from the brickfile.
Wait for a few days and then come back to the hints. Who is the target of this game?
Try to reconstruct the features and mechanics that you can reconstruct. Focus on the simple things, don’t overcomplicate it.
Wait again for a few days and then come back. Does that make sense? Is the audience the same again or you are looking for other kind of Players?
Repeat 3 and 4 until you are happy with your result
The best way to learn how to write for video games is to do it. Write, print your work, read it aloud. Reading aloud is critical to develop your text comprehension skills. Do not be shy nor lazy. Read your works aloud!
If you don’t know how to start because you have no time to code or to make a game, don’t worry. Think in the game you love, imagine a situation between two of its characters. The situation can have branches inside, but maximum 2 endings: the good and the bad.
Now it’s time to write your script. Sarah Longthorne released a while ago this fantastic templatefor branching narrative in visual novels. You may want to start from here. This is one of the best resources I have ever found for free.
If you are thinking in an RPG, of course that will be different from a visual novel. In this case the triggers that bring the story to the players are different.
You should think in those triggers and create your own template!
One of the skills that make a game designer instantly hireable is the deconstruction of games. It is no easy task to complete, since the first instinct is to end the job once we have identified the core loop, the secondary loop and maybe some unique feature.
I have seen too many times teams copying from here and there after a quick deconstruction and the result is something like
Not cool huh?
A good deconstruction looks for the audiences of some game and wants to really empathize. Having a document with the core features is nice, but having empathy maps, customer journeys and personas at the end of it is key for the success of a project.
Play the game for the right amount of time
Look for its update logs: you need to know where developers put the highest efforts
Read reviews and study them
Look for streamers, those are free playtests
Join Discord channels and Reddits to spot the interesting and pain points
Run playtests of your competitorsTry to interview core Players
With all those insights, build your Player. Forget demographics, focus on behaviors and needs!
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