I have noticed in those years of carreer three main things that all successful companies share.
When we are joining a game company, many times we are just looking for a job. We study the companies and we look at their games. The most probable thing is working on a game that will not be successful. That’s a fact, there are statistics for that.
The first thing is that they have a great administrative department. They know how to keep the bills in order, how much the company is spending and what is the revenue. They are tracking their burn rate and the house it’s in order.
The second thing is that there is at least one person dedicated exclusively to quality assurance. Testing the game every single day, reporting bugs and creating processes to improve and automate the process of finding bugs. QA people save games. Games without QA will most probably just be bad games.
Ultimately, there is at least one person dedicated to community management and marketing. Games nowadays work a little like a service. Even a small indie game when published receives feedbacks and reviews and devs have to iterate inevitably. You need people dedicated exclusively to the sales, external communications and support.
If you are about to join a project with no QA people, or no administrative people or no sales/support/community people believe me: red flag! If it is your first project it may be OK according to its scope, but not expect quality, security nor players satisfaction.
This post is about ownership of the development of a feature or mechanic in a video game. Many companies say that they need people who really own the tasks they have. Ownership is very important but also a little fuzzy concept.
What I understand for ownership is different from what you mean with the same word. It is also different from reality to reality. It is not the same to own the design and development of a secondary feature than to own the core mechanic of a new game.
To me, the secret of good ownership is being able to maintain a vision while adapting to the context. The term ownership can be easily confused with property ownership. If your duty is to own some feature, the best you can do is to build on what you have, leaving the borders of your property open.
Vision
In the world of data driven development it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking “data is everything”, repeating the same mistakes over and over or offering the same formula to the Players.
Data is not everything. Data is a resource that has to be translated into information, otherwise everything can be read. Ownership means also to be able in doing this translation. You need to make hypotheses, you need to verify those hypotheses using concrete experiments and then you can discuss how to transform the information in actions.
It is very hard having the right data ready at the start of some new implementation, so that often you need to rely on other elements to form your vision:
Your own personal experience brings inevitably something interesting to the discussion table.
Never forget that game design is also art, you should put something very personal in if you want to really engage your team and Players in your vision.
You need to know the state of the art, breaking down the same feature implemented in other games. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel.
You need to connect with the people playing those games and really understand what it works and why.
Context
It is very unlikely to create the next f2p success with a team of 3 developers and 2 artists and no QA, right? If you have a small team, a feature can take aeons to get right. Most of the times you cannot iterate properly, your manager will pass to the next feature and your work will cripple. This happens in the majority of companies, and it is completely normal. Owning your design means accepting this and move forward. It’s hard, I know.
From the other side, it is very hard to create a fresh core loop with a team of 80 people. Politics, meetings and dispersion of the information will make you struggle to properly transmit your insight with the rest of the team. In that case, it is way better to take a strong base and then focus on improving the experience in terms of UX. Believe me, you will save a lot of stress.
Being aware of the context is very important, the magic lies where you can do the best you can with what you have. When you have the feeling that you can do everything with no limitations, it probably means that the context is not clear to the leadership nor to the team. Red flag. When you own a feature, you should try to clarify:
Goals with all the stakeholders
Concrete deadlines with weekly/bi-weekly intermediate milestones
Concrete quality expectations for the feature you own.
Final thoughts
The rise of automation is solving a lot of problems and saving us a lot of time. If we really want to be the professionals of tomorrow, we should focus our attention on providing the right solutions and vision according to the context we work in.
Ownership is one of the most important factors of the future landscape of professional game design.
I was talking with a LinkedIn contact I made recently and he told me that his company is working on a specific platform for a specific place in the US. I asked him why to target just a specific location instead than a broader region. He told me that he wants to build something very innovative and meaningful. It is not necessary to boil the Ocean, he added.
This man is completely right. We often fall into the trap of thinking too big. We know that videogames can become huge and scale tremendously. We often start to argue on scalabilty and growth before of even produce the very first demo. That attitude brings a lot of cursed design problems.
Best games start from the will to deliver the best possible gameplay to the smallest possible audience, many times. Before of 2012 very few realities were thinking in serving mature women with their games. Then the thing became huge. The games of that time scaled. It was because they were very well made.
During my entire career I have always heared the same mantra by managers: people do not like to read texts. Time passed by and I discovered that Players read when there is something really interesting from a gameplay perspective to read.
A game is a language to tell a story and many times it’s important to deliver part of this story in terms of flavor texts. Flavor texts are not critical texts, but enrich the experience with more details.
Someone read all the books in Skyrim
Flavor texts can be ignored by the Players who just want the core experience. Anyway, they foster Players to know more about the game’s world. They are an opportunity to deliver more polish to the people.
There is a new technique that facilitates the reading of texts that I think can be applied to flavor texts. It is called bionic reading.
Hypercasual games present a simple and very readable innovative mechanic. I worked on them for more than a year and I have to say that I see a similar approach to prototyping only in game jams and indie game development.
The business is not scalable anymore
Hypercasual games are part of the free-to-play business model, but heavily based on ads. The player acquisition cost has to be inferior to the ad revenue for the game to work. Then, a successful game has to scale and grow. That translates in moving a large number of people from game to game, optimizing the acquisition costs. Apple completely destroyed this concept with new privacy policies. So that hypercasual seems not to be a viable business model anymore.
Snackability, YouTubability and other important abilities
Working on hypercasual games, a game designer really understands the importance of the fundamentals. A good hypercasual game is understandable also from a single screenshot of the game. I was always fascinated by this concept, it’s like a jump into the past where the games were simple and colorful. People chose them just walking in a mall or in an arcade room giving a fast hint.
We often forget the importance of the readability of game mechanics. Mobile phones are in the pockets of a huge variety of people. If we want to broad our audience and include everyone, we should focus on delivering a fun experience without loading too much the cognitive systems of our players.
Successful hypercasual games are parodies of real life. I spent hours on social media taking inspiration for new crazy mechanics. I found this awesome. In the industry, in fact, we have the tendency in thinking in games in old terms: dragons, magic, warriors, jumping Italian plumbers and so on.
Hypercasual opened a whole new World to me!
Working on hypercasual, finally, helped me understand a lot of secrets of Unity3D engine. It is great, since the work is very technical. I don’t have to prepare too many docs and presentation, just focus on the game feel of a single concept.
I will always be thankful! This is a game I helped creating, one of the (few) hits we had:
The service games of the future will understand the type of Player and offer a personalized experience to everyone.
A few weeks ago I watched an online conference organized by Deconstructor of Fun, the best known medium of news and opinions on the games business.
There were a lot of interesting interventions, one person made some prediction: Eric Seufert, a digital marketing and freemium expert.
Eric proposed true innovations, he called them megatrends. This post works on the first megatrend which you can watch here:
minute 2:00:56
Ad Networks are no longer able to deliver exactly the audience you are looking for. It must be the game itself that identifies the type of person playing. Depending on the subject, the games of the future will have to offer the experience that that specific person is looking for.
Building on the idea
I have been thinking how it would be possible to accomplish something like this. Acquisition campaigns will focus in bringing in a very broad audicence. I believe that games will need a casual backbone:
A simple mechanic (easy to learn, hard to master) will be at the base of the casual backbone. The mechanic will evolve over the course of the days with new obstacles and features.
How to understand if your player wants more? Offers! We will design offers and try to understand if the player is looking for something more. In which case a midcore layer activates:
The midcore layer is an evolution, but Players should not have to use a spreadsheet to understand how it works!
This layer will add a secondary loop with a more complex progress and monetization system. During this stage, the game can propose to the Players a subscription or an offer that activates the hardcore path.
This is where players who want a more complicated experience come in. At this stage it will probably be possible to put the core mechanics in automatic mode.
Conclusion
The people who pay even a little bit are the ones who understand your game and really appreciate it. They will stay and play over time, for sure. It’s brilliant to imagine a future with games that are able to adapt to the type of audience.
Games like Archero are very close to this concept. Their iterations led them to results similar to those described in this article.
Designing a game of this type requires large investments and a team that really understands how game as a services works. How to get meaningful information from data and work on a vision according to what Players really want.
The casual backbone is pretty straightforward, centered in a single mechanic. A Player should find always content with new interesting mechanics and things to do in short sessions (<15m)
The midcore path offers a new layer of deepness only to people who are willing to dedicate more time per session (15-30m)
And then the hardcore path requires a higher cognitive effort and larger session times (>45m)
In recent years, the concept of metagame has spread a lot. We can say that the metagame is what makes you think about the game when you are not playing.
"I have to open the app to collect my wheat."
"I'll play again because I want to improve with Nidalee."
"They are attacking me, better come back immediately and defend me."
Our life has become very connected and dependent on screens. We have become more impatient, we want things immediately and where we are. Playing video games is no exception. This is why in recent years we have seen the concept of games on demand increasingly develop.
You can play GenShin Impact from almost every device
Also the acquisition costs on mobile devices are rising, due to the new policies and the imminent elimination of fingerprinting. Free-to-play is a type of business that continues to require large volumes of people.
For all these reasons, I believe successful games will be on demand. With successful I mean: big, stable and scalable revenues. This is a great challenge for the game designers of tomorrow.
Venues
The first challenge concerns the places where people will play. It is not the same to play from the desk, from the sofa and waiting for the tram. Where people choose to play definitely affects the kind of approach people have with the game.
Games are everywhere!
If I turn a console on and wait for the game to start I will probably sit on my sofa. This situation will invite me to stay focused on this activity.
You will run a game only if some goal can be reached in a short time, when you are at three stops from your destination.
"Maybe I can beat a level of a puzzle game, or I can put resources into production that I will need later to perform my attacks."
Sitting at my desk, I probably have some time to check my progress and plan my next steps.
Imagine a game about war that is a shooter from a console, a merge from a mobile and a strategic one from a browser. Cool huh?
Fractal experience (when and where)
Some games will likely be the same game on many platforms. It’s probably the smartest and least risky thing to do. The main challenge are the controls. For example, Genshin Impact demonstrated that is possible to find a minimum common denominator. The concept of metagame will play then a very important role to identify all possible gameplays.
I’m a designer and I can afford to let my ideas run wild, right?
For me, the games of the future will be fractal experiences. A person can choose whether to play a game from all platforms. In that case, the gaming experience will be different but holistic. Or a person may decide to play only one version of the game. The war game we picked up might be only a merge game for someone. And that’s completely fine.
The development teams of tomorrow will be able to offer a fractal service. Then the people will choose to approach it when and where they want to. As I said in previous post, accessibility will play a critical role.
Matchmaking
Games with a competitive component will consider all the ways in which a player approaches them. A player who plays only the shooter part of our imaginary war game will not progress on merge levels.
Your Player Journey Map will consider all experiences and their intersections
Someone might think that instead it is better to reward those who move on all versions of the game. Players that engage with more versions of a game should definitely get the fun they look for. Nobody should feel guilty for not doing it, anyways.
The war for attention will culminate at some point. Aren’t you tired of this constant drain of your cognitive resources? I am.
The games of the future will profile and treat Players with respect. Companies must reward players who decide to participate in their game and allow them to challenge others. This behaviours will definitely affect the matchmaking algorithms.
All around the World, everyday hundreds of people publish their games on virtual stores. The efforts required to get the attention of the players are enormous. Apple’s new policies regarding player privacy only make this situation worse. The costs of acquisition campaigns are increasing dramatically and it is increasingly difficult to find people who like your type of game.
Look at that copy: nobody will accept to be “tracked”. It’s survivorship!
If we then consider that a substantial percentage of these people have hearing, vision and / or mobility problems, we risk wasting money by acquiring people who will never be able to play our game even if they want to.
There is one thing I have learned in recent years in industry: the development of a game compared to the marketing of the same is cheap. It is less risky to develop a good game, because then the benefits are seen in the announcement phase of the game. I therefore believe that accessibility features will be increasingly needed in the games of the future, regardless of the platform.
The first reason, as we have said, is the increase in the player base.
In order to improve your sales, make beautiful games that everyone can pick and play despite of physical and mental challenges.
The Last of Us 2 true innovation wasn’t about gameplay. It was about Accessibility.
The second reason is that accessibility allows for better games. Games with friendly interfaces, which perhaps allow you to customize the experience according to the type of player and his physical characteristics. Let’s face it: now a lot has been done in terms of creativity. There are games that metaphorize all kinds of experiences and contexts. There is still room for innovation, but few things are more important than accessibility.
Where to start
For me, a good design process always starts with a diagnosis.
A sincere diagnosis that asks questions and generates hypotheses on which the team can feel motivated to collaborate. Microsoft on its site dedicated to accessibility asks the following questions:
Can you complete the game using a single hand?
Would an average person be able to pick the game up and play?
Can you effectively play the game on a small monitor or TV sitting at a distance?
Do you support more than one type of input device that can be used to play through the entire game?
Can you play the game with sound muted?
Can you play the game with your monitor set to black and white?
When you load your last saved game after a month, can you easily figure out where you are in the game and know what you need to do in order to progress?
During my career years I have realised that I cannot predict exactly where my path will lead me. Anyway, I can speculate, dream and plan.
If I continued in the world of free-to-play , I would like to be able to work on a vision that I have been forming over the years at some point. A vision on a positive way of creating free-to-play games.
This type of game needs a huge number of people to play, as normally 2% of them decide to invest money and help you sustain the business. Here’s why we see fake ads, intrusive pop-ups that block gameplay, dark patterns, and so on. On the one hand, the number of instals will be increased by improving the chances of finding players. On the other hand, we try to improve conversion to payers.
If we carefully analyse the market we see that there are games capable of generating enormous benefits in a short time. There are also other games that generate less benefits in the short term, but that last much longer over the years.
Think of the case of hyper casual games, games that when they are successful last very little (at most a few months). Think now of free-to-play web games like Drakensang Online, which have been on the market for 16 years.
These days I will talk about this vision that I have developed and how I would apply it. Maybe I can move some interesting energy!
If you really want to learn how to design game systems, I recommend starting from board games.
System designers are rare and in high demand in the industry. Especially with the advent of new business models and technologies, people capable of breaking down a game into systems and finding the connections between them are really rare and highly appreciated.
The temptation when starting to design systems is to start by opening a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is by far the most used tool for game development. However, there is no need to open it from the start. When you start thinking about breaking a game down, it is best to use all your senses. Better to use touch and sight, above all.
The best way to start thinking in a system is therefore to prototype the system in the form of a board game. When you work as a game designer your job is to study games that already exist. Also to carry out this very important task, I recommend that you synthesize the video game in question (or the more interesting parts of it) into a board game to really understand all its parts.
Creating board games could save you months of development and playtesting!
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