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Category: Game Design

Stop knocking

Published by Paolo on 27/10/2025

Imagine a big gate. Behind that gate lies the success of the game you are making. Now, imagine you are standing right in front of it. Suddenly, you hear a voice:

“Why should you enter this gate?”

This voice represents all the Players. They want a single, compelling reason for you to gain access to that success.

You could start by listing the good qualities of your game—it’s like sending a resume: “This game does this and that.” Or, you could tell them the game is simply proof that you can make games, which isn’t a terrible argument, considering 80% of games never see the light. You could even beg them to let you in, like a personal favor, so you can continue making games.

Sending resumes, trying to prove things to strangers, or begging will probably not make them open the gate for you. In fact, they need a real will to open the gate in the first place.

Whether you’re looking for a job or selling your game, try to avoid the “gate situation.” Build your own stand outside of the walls, show off your merchandise, and let them invite you in.

We are based on deadlines

Published by Paolo on 26/10/2025

The games industry is a deadline-based industry. That’s why you often see terrible practices like crunch. Crunch is typically concentrated in the last few weeks of a project, and it is fundamentally a management failure. Systemic crunch makes things unsustainable. People will become stressed, burn out, and quit—and this could eventually damage the entire industry.

Great games are made by teams that strive for success. If you are both ambitious and smart, you can design a game to be sustainable. But you must be acutely aware of deadlines and accept that our sector is based on them, because you can’t really control everything else.

Always Optimize Tools

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 25/10/2025

I’ve been working in the game’s industry for about 2 decades now and I’ve come to learn is that one of the best things a team can do is to optimize their tools. Any tool that helps facilitate the game development process is worth optimizing, but most specifically the tools that create the content that is directly consumed by the players.

Many readers of this blog will know from experience that second-to-second gameplay, levels, missions, challenges, cut-scenes, narrative intersection bits, music, sound effects, controls and everything else the player experiences in your game will become better with iteration. The more designers go through the process of playing and improving the better the experience becomes. Nintendo famously calls this process “finding the fun”, and that’s exactly that. Fun needs to be discovered in the game you’re creating.

Games are almost exclusively created in a high stress, pressure cooker environment and in many studios there is hardly any room to play. But playing your own game while questioning what will make it better, what will make it more fun, how to surprise the player is vital. After you made some adjustments, some tweaks or some experiments it vital to play again and again. But in a pressure cooker environment, nobody has time for that, I hear you say

That’s why you need great tools! Great tools reduce effort and create time within your project that you wouldn’t have without them. Great tools afford more iterations and inevitably make a game more fun.

There’s another superpower that I can attribute to tools and that is that they motivate! Nothing kills the motivation of an intelligent person more than repeating boring work, repeating hard to imagine setups and long waiting times between adjustments and experiencing the adjustments in the game environment. The faster the designers can round trip between their adjustments and the experience, the more motivated the designer will be to do the experimentation and playing required to actually “find the fun”.

Vision and clocks

Published by Paolo on 23/10/2025

Recently, I was hired for a gig as a fractional leader on a new genre. The team was skilled and talented, and the environment was fantastic. Also, the vision was clear, and my client was very creative. Without even noticing it, I worked lots of hours—much more, actually, than the hours I billed.

Some time ago, I was working on another project with a different client. The vision was messy and definitely not based on anything apart from personal opinions. The team was split across multiple projects, and the goals weren’t clear. Someone told me on a Monday, “I wrote you the whole weekend over Slack, where have you been?” And I answered, “I’m sorry, I don’t work on weekends.”

I believe that crunch is a systemic issue in our industry, and since we have pipelines, it’s avoidable. However, a team truly aiming for success will always have certain members willing to work extra to contribute to a good project. If someone asks me to work more, I will probably be reluctant. But when I feel I want to, I am happy to work extra hours. Things aren’t always black and white.

Collage of features

Published by Paolo on 22/10/2025

I met a colleague yesterday who is working on a project with no clear vision. Because of this, plans are constantly shifting, and prototypes are discarded just by pointing a finger to the sky. There is no one accountable for the game’s vision; the Creative Director is the company founder, and of course, he cannot be fired. The game feels like a collage of features, not a proper, cohesive experience.

I told him that this is very common, and it’s one of the main reasons behind the failure of so many games. Someone years ago said that 80% of games never see the light. This is why: you don’t have a clear vision of the experience you want to deliver. You only decide on the genre, and then you add, “but we’ll make it more casual,” without even intensively playing those kinds of games. You aren’t connecting with the audience. You aren’t willing to embark on the creative journey for real. So, you end up trying out things, making one prototype, not properly evaluating the results, and then moving on to something else—like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Maybe something will stick, and in rare cases, you might even get lucky and make some money. But that is not the way you build long-lasting, billion-dollar games.

Resist and persist

Published by Paolo on 21/10/2025

Perseverance is critical to staying competent in game design and in the business in general. Making the choice to enter the industry might be easy at the start—games are cool, and we all love them. But you’ll face resistance sooner or later: turning points and real obstacles to your choices.

That’s when you have to show up, put your soul into it, and demonstrate perseverance. Somehow, I consider resistance a kind of grace. Because without it, one would never prove their real commitment to something.

Things get harder when you’re working on a personal project. Aside from all the actual questions about the game you’re making, there are external pressures and survival doubts: Will I make it? Then you connect with people and discover easier opportunities to pick up. Working for others releases a lot of the stress you have when working alone.

That’s why it’s important to set concrete goals, every 6–10 weeks. These are checkpoints to reach, helping you ignore the sirens’ calling and trying to resist. I have seen people make incredible things in 10 weeks if they have a clear purpose. And if you persist and resist, the reward is something that will be with you forever: competence.

Think multiplayer

Published by Paolo on 19/10/2025

Games as a concept were born multiplayer. Single-player video games are a relatively new concept, and now we’re even seeing the rise of single-player board games.

When you’re sketching out ideas for a new game, you might think single-player first. That’s because it’s hard to deliver a high-quality multiplayer game with a low budget. So, you naturally focus on stories, builds, gameplay beats, and so on. And that is great; my favorite games are like that. I’m used to playing my games alone, in my studio.

But games as a concept are multiplayer per se, so it’s not a bad idea to also think about an online version of your beats and narrative. The best common denominator, if you want to avoid too much struggle, is “to be goofy together.”

I leave you with this video on the Evolution of Online Worlds by Raph Koster. What? You don’t know who he is? Do your work, buddy.

The AI Counter Wave

Published by Tj'ièn Twijnstra on 18/10/2025

Our relationship with AI is still very much in development, like our relationship with other technologies, it will be shaped by time and usage. Take our smart phones, we seemingly can’t live without it, but school and parents seem to try and keep our kids away from them – at least for a while. AI is a different beast all together, but pros and cons are discussed daily everywhere. It seems that the technology is fundamental and it already affects many peoples lives.

It seems there’s a double standard that many are not aware of they possess. For instance, I noticed how recruiters and managers seem to praise AI in their work. Summarizing batches of resumes, auto filtering great from good candidates and offloading batches of work to optimize their workflow. AI is great! But when candidates use AI to write the perfect cover letter, create position based resumes and extraordinary motivations, recruiters and managers seem to hate and automatically deny the application. This is a double standard where the technology seems to be both great and very bad at the same time and in many cases this double standard isn’t felt by the person who possesses it.

But I think this double standard provides a clue to what the counter wave of AI will be. I believe all things come in pairs of opposites. Light and darkness exist only in relation to each other, like noise and silence, like chaos and order. AI will create a zest for CounterAI, the deeply personal, the things that exist because of effort and human suffering. The recruiter and managers that make their work impersonal and soulless by using AI to sift through their candidates demand heartfelt personal motivational letters and carefully crafted resumes with a clear human touch. AI will expose the need for humans to grow through hardship, suffering, commitment and purpose. Like microwave meals make you hungry for your mother’s favorite dish, so to will AI make you hungry for the purpose full and human.

Surrender

Published by Paolo on 16/10/2025

Whenever you’re struggling with a creative problem, there’s a specific moment when you feel you desperately need help. Today, it’s very easy to find software that supposedly assists with just that. You prompt your need in a chat, and the software mimics a human expert and gives you advice.

Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.

Frank Herbert, Dune

In that very moment, however, you have already lost the battle for creativity. You will have surrendered your uniqueness to a probabilistic algorithm that will spit out something random, and more importantly, something common and average. In this Age of Average we’re all living in, you’ll probably feel like you’ve solved your problems.

But you’ve lost because you gave up.

Beyond Nostalgia and Speed

Published by Paolo on 12/10/2025

I was exploring the stands of BCN Games Fest ’25 here in Barcelona and trying out a couple of indie games. Then I asked “WHY?” to almost all of their creators. The answers generally landed between:

“I think that the visuals are good, nostalgic, bla bla,”

and

“It’s something simple I can do in a small amount of time.”

Well, to me, neither answer is a good one, and I’m sorry to say it. For me, visuals are very important, but they cannot be the hook for a game. You need a fantasy to fulfill as the very first thing, in my opinion. That fantasy can be taken from the real world, from other forms of entertainment, or even from other games, but only if you genuinely think you can improve something.

Regarding the second answer, you need to be very ambitious if you want to make games. It’s good and necessary to put a time limit on your craft. But to me, that shouldn’t be the driver of your creative choices. As an indie developer, you should aim to deliver something meaningful out there.