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Tag: inspiration

The Strategy Fork

Published by Paolo on 17/11/2025

Performance Marketing expert Matej Lancaric issued a strong “WAKE UP call” to Supercell, critiquing their slow pace, their seemingly “random” new projects (like the “BOAT game”), and their failure to launch a hit in years.

Matej’s point: Why isn’t Supercell making a strategy game? Look at Century Games and Rivergame—they are launching hits, leveraging years of development and templatization.

Matej and his colleague Jakub Remiar are fundamentally right about the market reality: Supercell is competing in the same giant mass market as these Chinese juggernauts. However, the strategy Supercell needs to adopt is a matter of competitive advantage, not market segment.

Competing on the Wrong Metric

Jakub points out that the Chinese giants are masters of scaling and aggressive UA. They specialize in perfecting proven formulas, backed by efficient labor and rapid execution.

The mistake for Supercell would be to adopt this same strategy. Why? Because on the field of quantity, templatization, and low-cost labor, it is a lost battle; a race to the bottom that Supercell cannot win without sacrificing its corporate culture and cost structure.

Quality as Novelty

The argument that “quality will save them” is often seen as a defense mechanism, but quality here does not mean polish on a clone. Quality, in the Supercell context, may mean novelty and emergent gameplay.

Supercell’s strength has always been finding new formulas within a strong social/multiplayer framework. If they discover the right key, a system that generates unpredictable, repeatable fun, they create a lasting intellectual property that is inherently difficult to copy. This is true innovation, and it’s their only path to sustainable, high-margin success.

They must either focus on their core IPs (more Clash Royale and Clash of Clans) or they must find a way to put out content faster while still prioritizing the discovery and novelty that defines their brand.

Choose Your Competitive Strategy

The great divide in mass-market mobile design is no longer just between Indie and AAA; it’s between The Template Master and The Emergence Hunter.

  1. If You Choose Templatization (The Century Games Path): Your primary focus must be UA efficiency and Monetization Optimization. Rigorously deconstruct the core loop of existing hits (Last War) and focus your design energy on maximizing retention and revenue curves within that proven framework.
  2. If You Choose Emergence: Focus 90% of your time on building a ruleset that generates an unexpected and delightful player experience. If you can’t discover the fun cheaply, put the project on pause.
  3. Know Your Runway: Innovation is expensive; execution is faster. Your choice of strategy must align with your budget reality.

Offline networking

Published by Paolo on 14/11/2025

Here is one of the advices I give to people trying to break into the industry: make sure you constantly meet people in real life.

Instead of staying at home preparing and sending résumés to dozens of applications, it is far better to spend two hours per day outside, perhaps at the gym or at a local course on something entirely unrelated to games.

This approach offers three crucial advantages:

1. Maintain Human Energy

You keep your energy levels high because you are meeting and talking with real humans, not just staring at a screen. Waiting for a response to an online application is passive and draining; engaging with the world is active and vital.

2. Design for Reality

When you meet people outside your professional bubble, you gain invaluable insight into their context. I often use these interactions to think about game design.

For example, I currently attend a Catalan language course twice a week. The class is full of nurses and public service workers who are there primarily to get a better contract, not necessarily to master the language. I notice they are tired, easily bored, and don’t want too much complication. Their lives are already full, balancing jobs and children.

How would I entertain someone like them? Not with a complex console game, right? They need a simple casual game, but it has to load fast and get straight into the gameplay. This helps me stay in touch with reality. It forces me to design for the actual, busy human being, not the idealized, endless-time “gamer.”

3. Unlock Lateral Opportunities

You significantly increase your chance of finding job opportunities in lateral sectors by meeting people who have nothing to do with the virtual bubble you’ve created in your online networks.

I honestly have the feeling that nowadays, it is often easier to find a job by going to the gym than by applying on LinkedIn.

Kondō and Synesthesia

Published by Paolo on 13/11/2025

I recently read a fascinating article on Enhance, the Japanese developer behind Tetris Effect and Lumines: Arise. Their company vision is, simply put, a breath of fresh air:

“Experience is king, synesthesia is queen.”

Synesthesia—the involuntary experience generated by stimulating one sensory pathway—and the concept of Kondō (to move emotionally) are the core of their design process.

I have a huge weak spot for companies with this kind of vision. They are hard to execute, but they make so much sense to me.

We are currently living in the era of the product managerization of game design, where every creative decision is filtered through short-term metrics. These experience-first points of view come like a breath of fresh air, reminding us of the original purpose of our craft.

We are humans making entertainment. Focusing solely on automation and metric-driven tuning can make us forget the human spark that creates great things.

Intense design discussions, deep conceptualization, and messy prototyping—that’s what I strive for.

Enhance starts by making music and then breaking that music down into pieces to design the right stages (levels). It is an inverted process that prioritizes the sensory and emotional outcome. It’s so interesting; I wish I could be in that room to see it.

Structured work

Published by Paolo on 12/11/2025

The other day, I was reflecting on how I carved out my space in this industry.

Today, that reality has changed. I have other responsibilities, and I can no longer dedicate the same time to my work. My energy levels aren’t what they were 15 years ago. I worked extremely hard to secure the professional space and flexibility I have now.

I still engage with the medium: I play games, about two hours a week, and spend my evenings studying books and taking online courses. Lately, I’ve been particularly focused on the history of games.

Otherwise, I dedicate my energy to activities outside of the games industry. My passion successfully evolved into a job, and ultimately, a job is a job. With time, one has to work less not more.

Strategy as a creative act

Published by Paolo on 09/11/2025

Martin Walfisz, founder of Massive Entertainment and writer of the Connecting Pixels newsletter, recently hit a crucial nerve: Most game companies have ambition, but no clear strategy.

He talks about how, when he started out, his ambition was just “Explosions must look amazing!“. I see this same pattern everywhere. Most teams are building a feature-collage that relies on luck rather than design. The core problem is exactly what Walfisz identifies: we confuse motion with direction.

Ambition is Easy; Strategy is Courage

Ambition is a resume: “This game will be the best in the world, it will hit X million MAU, and it will have blockchain integration.” Ambition is free. Everyone has it.

Strategy, by contrast, is courage. Strategy is saying NO to the 99 good ideas so you can focus on the one great thing that your game, and only your game, is built to master.

Walfisz nails the essence: “Strategy is about deciding where to become great.”

  • Ambition asks: “What else can we add to appeal to everyone so we can make lots of money?”
  • Strategy asks: “What will we say no to, so we can double down on this one, unique feeling that respects the player’s time?”

Companies fear that choosing a lane will limit their creative freedom. But as Walfisz notes, it’s the opposite: boundaries don’t stifle creativity, they sharpen it.

Success Should Compound, Not Reset

When you build a game purely on ambition, its success is a lottery win. Walfisz points out the high cost of this: “Without a clear strategy, success doesn’t compound. It resets.”

If your strategy changes with every new project you are throwing away the expertise, the audience loyalty, and the pattern recognition you earned on the last project.

Success must become a pyramid built on the cumulative expertise of your team, not a single, isolated pillar of luck.

Look at the example of Landfall, which Walfisz cites: they were self-aware enough to realize their strength was “creating inventive, funny, highly shareable multiplayer experiences.” They focused on that one thing and restructured their studio around it. That is the definition of turning your culture into your strategy.

The 100 hours weeks

Published by Paolo on 08/11/2025

Michail Katkoff, founder of the brilliant Deconstructor of Fun podcast, recently made an uncomfortable but valid point about 996: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six-days-a-week schedule.

He argues that when you’re early in your career, time is your only leverage. You don’t have the pattern recognition yet. The only way to earn that wisdom, like a surgeon or an investment banker, is through sheer, brutal volume. He says you must work hard before you can work smart.

I agree with him. Volume builds experience, and experience is the only thing that separates the dreamers from those who achieve mastery. But there’s a crucial distinction that separates self-sacrifice from exploitation.

Back in 2014, I was staring at a resume with two incomplete projects. I had lost my second job as a game designer. The industry was already demanding a commitment I hadn’t delivered. It was the turning point where I decided: I am going to stay in this industry, no matter the cost.

The cost was high. Achieving what I have now required working more than 100 hours a week. That is the hard truth of earning my space in this sector. I was fortunate to have a wonderful family who provided emotional and financial support; without them, it would have been impossible.

However, I have never accepted working more than eight hours a day for someone else. I have the luxury of being supported emotionally and economically from my family. The story would have been different otherwise.

This is the critical difference:

  • 996 for the Company is often a management failure masked as ambition. It’s an unsustainable practice where you burn your hours and your health to deliver someone else’s messy vision. It’s exploitation, pure and simple.
  • 100 Hours for Yourself is like hard training, instead. It means building your own systems, and your future.

When I was rebuilding my career, I was awake before dawn, spending my days working intensively and alone. I discovered Michail’s podcast, taking notes at night. I developed my own systems, my own frameworks, and my own unique pattern recognition.

I was working for my competence. I was working to build my own gate so that I could one day invite the market in, rather than begging for access. I couldn’t skip the hours and the volume. I am sure that it’s not the only way, but it’s the one that avoids most of the risks.

Thoughts on 996 (aka Crunch)

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 07/11/2025

I love my work and I work a lot. Yes, I feel that I have to, because I feel responsible for our team, for our game, for our publisher who’s placing a lot of trust in us and our game and I’m ambitious and eager to succeed. But I crunch when I feel like it. In our team, no-one is ever forced to crunch, nor is it expected. We repeat to ourselves and each other that we do not need to crunch.

I used to think crunch very much avoidable and is all due to bad planning, and to an extend it is. You always have to factor in that things take longer and that game development is very dynamic. But it’s not that simple. Ambitions and aspirations won’t be tamed that easily and having a drive to succeed is an unstoppable force.

But 996 (working from 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week) is extremely unhealthy, even for a single week, especially if it’s mandated and expected but you planned for 955. In our team, if we feel we’re running behind schedule, we reprioritize and focus on the things we can finish and replan for the things that fall of the schedule. So not only do you need to plan realistically, expect dynamic development and ambitious team members, you also need to be flexible and adept to any situation to make sure crunch is not considered a tool.

Crunch is avoidable and should be avoided, but crunch if you feel like it on a personal level.

Beyond your resume

Published by Paolo on 05/11/2025

Companies and investors look at the past experience of a candidate or an entrepreneur to determine if the person is right for the position or investment. This makes sense because you want to reduce risks as much as you can. Having people with concrete experience on something working on that something gives at least the feeling that they can do it well.

In the case of game design, this translates to genres and platforms. Companies look for economy designers who have worked on idle RPGs, for instance. Investors will probably fund ex-Riot people to make a new MOBA game for the US market.

But if you are a real game designer, you can work on different genres. I mean, if you know the basics of problem identification, audience, deconstructing mechanics, and so on, you can work on a platform game for PS5 even if you previously worked on casual match-3 games for mobile. We are not finding the cure for cancer, right?

In most cases, the only way of proving this capacity is alone or in a game jam. It’s hard to be hired by a company in a completely different environment. But the reality is that there are fashions, and maybe that popular genre in your area becomes uninvested, and you have to reinvent yourself.

How to do that? I prefer to start by applying my past experiences to the new challenges. The capacity to adapt insight and look at everything as a system is key. And it is a talent, so you need to cultivate it. I hold a design diary and often take notes of these cross-references and analogies.

The art of discovery

Published by Paolo on 04/11/2025

What is art? To me, art is everything that makes me discover something new. Video games are about fun, and fun is basically discovery. It’s the discovery of some skill we have, the discovery of how a certain story will end. It’s the discovery of a new technology, or maybe the discovery of a new type of appearance or visual style.

It’s clear that video games are pure art under this optic. This includes even games made purely for cash, like gambling games or aggressive free-to-play games. We discover something about ourselves in any case. Of course, that “something” can be bad as well.

New social-gambling game idea

Published by Paolo on 03/11/2025

Watch this video and, if you like it as much as I do, listen to this idea.

Here are the rules:

  • The board is a circle.
  • There are 4 balls of different colors: green, blue, red, and yellow.
  • Balls start with a random speed in a random direction.
  • Every time they hit the circular border, they create a connection.
  • Every time they hit the connection of another ball, they take possession of that connection.
  • When a ball has no connections, it disappears from the board.

Let’s talk about the real game:

The Player Input (The Bet)

Imagine being able to bet on a color. Each bet directly contributes to the strength of the ball. The more you bet on a color, the more you influence its force or mass, the more likely it is to smash an opponent’s connection.

The Reward (The Jackpot)

The final prize will be proportional to the number of links the final remaining ball possesses. This proportion can be explored because there are clear opportunities for jackpots: imagine a scenario where a single color quickly dominates and consumes the entire board’s connection count.

What do we have here?

We just designed a new kind of gambling game. It combines:

  1. Observable Physics: It feels “fair” because you can see the action.
  2. Social Conviction: You are betting on belief, not just chance.
  3. Variable Reward: The proportional reward and jackpots drive engagement.
  4. Minimum Interaction: And players can continue betting as long as the game goes.

We used colors, movement, and the irresistible draw of a collective bet.

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