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Tag: professional

Common ground beliefs

Published by Paolo on 05/12/2025

Marketing works better if the marketer believes in the product. Game design can help with this, if the company allows the communication between designers and marketers.

Sometimes, though, we are working on a game we don’t really believe in. We are there just for the job, someone above makes all the calls and we do not see any value behind the strategy. It happens, more than it should actually.

Everything gets more complicated from there, so one of our duties in this case is to find common ground and push to focus the efforts on that. Because only that may become unique, in the end.

Interesting interview to mr. Owen Mahoney

Published by Paolo on 03/12/2025

Mr. Owen Mahoney is one of the few outspoken gaming CEOs out there that speaks actual game development language. I listened to this interview and one thing has made me think a lot, also because it’s not well explained.

Mr. Mahoney talks about the importance of looking at the future intentions of a team or company to understand its shape. He makes the specific example of the founder of Embark, who wanted to make something new, something different. But that’s always the case whenever there is a sales opportunity. We do want to show what we did, our experience, but we also want to say, “Hey, we are building the future here; do not miss the opportunity to go with us towards it.”

How can we really understand when we are in front of a good company? Now I want to switch my discourse from the perspective of an employee or a consultant. How to understand that the client or employer we have in front of us is the right bet for our next 2-5 years? That’s a matter of gut feeling, but is there a way to make a sort of due diligence? That’s what I would like to ask Mr. Mahoney.

What I did while waiting

Published by Paolo on 01/12/2025

I read this article that expresses something I started saying at least 7 years ago: social media are new forms of online role playing games.

Back in 2015 I was working for a soccer games company and I pitched them a farm game but with soccer. My pitch got approved, but we didn’t manage to arrive to the first playable of the game for a series of reasons. Regarding my responsibility, it was because basically I had no experience in managing a big budget project within an already estabilished company. Plus I was in a hard moment of my life and well, things didn’t get good for me.

But the idea evolved in my mind and years later, in 2019, I pitched another game based on the same concept of a youth soccer academy to a local videogames incubator. My vision was exactly that the game should perform like a social media. There was an infinite feeds of event, and many characters posted their updates. By interacting with those posts, you basically managed the evolution of the school and the success of your team.

I still believe in that vision, but it didn’t worked because I had no money and didn’t had good founders for that stage. I got people that just wanted a job, and it wasn’t the case.

I am thankful for all these experience and I believe in waiting for the right moment. Maybe the right moment for me to put out something truly mine will come, maybe it will not. The important thing is to have the possibility of designing games every single day, in the end.

Start making memorable levels

Published by Paolo on 29/11/2025

If you are making levels professionally, you cannot just jump in the engine and placing shapes and mechanics here and there. You need a way of plan and communicate your design choices ahead. The big picture of the level and how it fits into the overall scheme of things is very much needed.

That’s why we use beat charts, a spreadsheet that puts everything in perspective. In my case, I have these fields:

  • Level ID: Unique name for the level, it should also correspond to the actual scene or map name inside of the engine.
  • Layout: a screenshot (or a link to a screenshot) of the level so that you and your teammates can directly recognize them when you have dozens levels.
  • Skill atom: the original unique thing the Player should learn or confirm during this level
  • Twist: if there is a special twist, describe it here. This can be filled later and just planned with a true/false text
  • List of mechanics: each column a single mechanic and a true/false if that mechanic is present inside of a level. Put the columns in order of appearance
  • Difficulty: the % of players who will not pass the level or die at least once.
  • Narrative: a short brief of what you are conveying to the Players (it can be a story, but also specific emotions)
  • Mood: useful to suggest your mood to environment art or in general artists. Try to put a mood board for them to understand. You can reuse the same mood boards over and over, of course. In this way you will also predict the weight of your design choices.
  • Music: similar to mood but put your musical references focusing on the feeling the Player should experiment during the level.

A clockmaker’s craft

Published by Paolo on 25/11/2025

Many confuse casual games with simple games. Casual games permit the satisfaction of instinctual needs in small (2–5 minute) play sessions. However, many hardcore players of these casual games can play them for hours. In fact, they are the players who actually maintain the business.

I’ve worked on a bunch of them, and I feel like a clockmaker. They may feel simple, but they are deep: you move one gear and you must check all the others connected to it. You need patience to achieve the sweet spot (the perfect balance).

To properly study your competitors, you need to analyze them in immense detail. You may even need to record a session and review it frame-by-frame to fully understand the game’s circuit and how it works.

Vulnerable latitude

Published by Paolo on 24/11/2025

I have met plenty of professionals who don’t actually love working in games, including game designers. I’m sure this is not news to you, and I also believe that everyone has a right to work in an industry as big as gaming, even if only for a while.

Yesterday, I met one of these people, who told me, “Videogames are your beach!” (using a Brazilian, Rio de Janeiro slang phrase). And I agree; I genuinely love my profession.

I have proof of that because I often put myself in a vulnerable financial position just for the sake of engaging in game design. A client might offer me shares as part of my compensation. If I like the client or the project, I accept, even if I know I may never see any money from it. I know that my task will end, the client will close the collaboration, and I will lose all shares.

I know this, and I consciously make that choice because I love what I do.

But I deeply respect the professionals who don’t care too much—the ones who pass through the industry like tourists, earn some money, and move on. They will have the opportunity to explore different things, and their minds probably won’t be 110% focused on games all the time, unlike mine. I respect that attitude very much as well.

Fast & Slow

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 22/11/2025

Previous post I talked about being part of a high performance team and how we’re able to become so effective in term of our output. This post is about a personal observation in how I’m able to work in such an environment and keep up with the team.

I’ve noticed that my contribution is not consistent. It is fast one day and slow the other day. Ow how I used to hate the fact that I’m slow on certain days, or sometimes even extended periods of time, while seeing the fast periods as normal. But I’ve come to understand that these slower days have a purpose.

Sometimes, being slow means that you need to recover and reenergize from a previous high performance day.

At other times the slower days means that for that particular moment I should spend my time working on something else. When it comes to new ideas and design solutions they sometimes it just require me to be in a particular mood, a particular zone in order for ideas and solutions to come naturally and fast.

Sometimes, being slow means I do not have enough input, or just not spend enough time on finding the solution. Sometimes, it means that I just need to stare longer at the particular problem I want to solve.

In the end, I came to realize that being able to be fast and productive I have to accept that being slow at other times is just part of the process and one does not exist without the other. I’m becoming more mindful of my energy, my own flow, my own limitations and my own process. I’m more accepting of myself.

How to use KPIs

Published by Paolo on 21/11/2025

I insist a lot on the importance of entertainment when we design new games. I spoke on this blog regarding the satisfaction of core instincts, and I am aware that someone would need something more actionable and practical. The easy resource is KPIs, which often are seeing like targets to hit. They aren’t in my opinion: they are diagnostic tools for spotting flaws in your gameplay, indicators.

For every feature, we first define the specific utility it provides, and then we measure its impact on player behavior.

Player InstinctThe Utility ProvidedImpact (examples)
Acquisition (Urge to collect)Giving the player interesting things to collect that drive progression.Completion Rate (Quests, levels, and the final game).
Social Connection (Gregariousness)Maintaining engagement and fostering community.Stickiness and high D7 Retention. Track the specific flows to connect with others and also the number of social interactions.
Assertiveness & MasteryThe feeling of power and competence within a core system.Win Rate and Feature Usage.
CuriositySatisfying the urge to discover new things.High Session Length. Qualitatively, the best sign is playtesters who genuinely want more at the end of a prototype. Check also heuristics after a playtest

Prototypes are essential, especially when playtested and attached to heuristics. By leading with the projected impact on player behavior, we demonstrate business value. This is how we continue the pursuit of l’avenir, the radical, unexpected break from the past.

Affording High Performance

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 18/11/2025

I’ve been working in a high performance environment for many years now. I’m amazed about the output of our small team (6 FTE+1 Free Lancer). To give you an example, we’re currently working on a casual puzzle game with a huge focus on narrative and world building. We’re approaching our 2 week release cadence which includes six to seven new fully animated story chapters and 90+ new levels, while releasing big new features every 4 weeks, with small and big tweaks, SDK updates, data gathering and general improvements, bug fixes and localization in many languages, while making sure we keep analyzing incoming data.

The casual puzzle space in which we’re operating is very competitive with thousands of entries a year with only a handful being able to succeed and enter the top 100. To get there, large teams (50-500 members) and large investments (1M-5M) are our competitors. And even in those teams, pressure to succeed is high and nothing but top performance is expected.

I’ve been thinking how we as a team make sure we are coping with this pressure. I believe we each individually have found a way to cope and collectively as a team found a way to facilitate and support each other. A large contributing factor for our small team is working from home. Not only does it cut out commute every day, saving a lot of time for each member. Working from home also afforded the environment where flexibility can occur. This flexibility in terms of working hours for instance is where some of our team members thrive.

We roughly work between 9-5 with strict attention rules around meetings. At least half of our team enjoys the ability to work during the quiet evenings, or pursuit a particular thought in the night. Others are able to schedule kids pick-up or going to the gym. And all of us enjoy the ability to let life happen and attend any important activity during working hours. Our team treats work as the second most important thing, next to our life outside of work. We cover for each other when someone is ill or experiences life changing events, we plan our schedules and priorities around vacations and time off, we accommodate members traveling the world and working from different time zone and generally we all help each other make it work.

But I think all of this would not be possible without a shared goal, without a shared ambition, without our internal drive to want to succeed. This focus enables us to do all of the above and I’m sure will drive us towards success.

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