My final wish for this year is to see all the realities I help really grow as they deserve.
I am a lucky guy. I have a great employer, which really cares about my progress as professional and lets me work also in other projects. And I have clients which always pay on time and respect my time.
They both value me a lot, this year I felt really an expert. This is not because I know everything, but because they made me feel like this.
I wish you all to feel the same, have a great year people!
This year (and the past one, too) has been very fruitful on the M&A side of things. We saw a whole lot of companies being acquired or merged with others.
For the next year I hope to see the early fruits of all that movement. I would like to really see how big corporate can improve their portfolio giving always better experiences to the people.
Also, I hope to see more deals made with small realities. I am noticing that investors are always more betting on teams without a single game published. I suppose they bet on their own experience bias, because the founding teams are always composed by industry veterans.
Young talent has a lot to say, and also if I am aware that investors are not willing to trust newbies, I believe that corporates should. They were young and junior at some point. They know how hard is getting. And maybe they can delegate to young startups some quick prototyping or more in general activities which are not core to the business but still really important.
This year we saw limitations and laws being issued by the government of China against video games and companies that make those.
I think that from a European perspective is pretty hard to really understand what is happening there. I read and listened to lot of people trying to explain, but few of them were convincing to me. We all have an image of China that is probably very biased.
My hope for 2022 is to see some opening. The games industry needs China, not just as market. We need the people, as we need all the World to really grow in a sustainable way. My fourth wish for 2022 is this.
For the next year I dream of an industry always more diverse and fresh.
I hope that all communities and also minorities will feel more included in it.
I hope to see also people from other sectors joining the industry bringing some fresh air.
I hope to see more junior professionals with an opportunity to really show off their talent.
I really hope to see this thing expanding as it deserves!
If you are reading this post it means that probably you are following my blog. This post is just to say you that I wish you a merry Christmas, thank you for reading every day!
I want to really contribute to the games industry in a meaningful way. I don’t know if I will ever work on a game changing video game, but I know that I can inspire others in doing that. I believe that the industry is going better and better but that we are in the desperate need of new bold ideas.
That is why we are seeing all this excitement around new concepts and technology, such as the metaverse and/or the crypto. Love them or hate them, but the subtle concept to me is that the World is looking for something different than AAA, indie and free-to-play. Something to push the industry forward.
My intention, really, is to help this something to came out from the nowhere. Maybe in a dark cave, with a bull and a donkey! That’s the true spirit of Christmas to me: respect the humble things because from there a true revolution can start.
Merry Christmas!
How do you define mechanics and features? This is very important for the success of the development. Many times, we think that just talking about something makes that clear for anyone. This is the most common mistake of inexperienced game designers.
“It’s simple, the character moves with the stick and shoots with the right trigger!”
With this sentence I have a gameplay in my mind and you have another.
You should really make the effort of empathizing with the people you are speaking with. Be as visual as possible. 60% visuals, 30% multimedia and only 10% written content is what I try to follow. It is better to speak on something visual and then find and solve all the related problems.
Often, the things we define will require some further set up. Maybe you will have to decide the speed of something. Maybe the odds for some reward. The best way to communicate this is to show clearly how you would like to set up the things, in the engine you are using or in some spreadsheet!
Do them a favor: speak about your needs!
I am writing this post from my hometown Naples, in Italy. This is the city where the Pizza was born when the queen of Italy, Margherita di Savoia, was going to the south of the country to visit the people here. That is why the first, and maybe most famous, pizza in the World has the color of the Italian flag and is named Margherita.
This city has two active volcanoes, Vesuvius and Campi Flegrei. As you can imagine it is not the safest place in the World. Still it is my mother, here I grew until 28 and here is where I had my basic education.
With the Pandemic, my job literally exploded. I now work for a company but I offer my services to a client here in Naples. They offer me their office space also when I am here. The client is AppIdeas, they are a strong team doing hypercasual games for publishers.
This year we had also a success, the hit Level Up Runner reached more than 1 million people. You may want to check it out!
I really hope this is the start of a new sector here in Italy. Right now there is not so much, especially in the South. Someone has to start helping, I think. I will definitely try it!
I have been observing the profiles of the most renowned game designers for some time. They all have one thing in common: they have developed frameworks and shared them with the world.
What are the tools and methodologies you use the most to tackle problems? Group everything, create a mind map, and share your thoughts every now and then. Your framework is interesting to the world, believe me!
Don’t waste any more time, start building your frameworks. It helps to think about everything in the form of a system. Excellent tool for optimizing times!
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: