Skip to content

Category: Game Design

You want to believe

Published by Paolo on 27/06/2025

There are companies that make games and do not believe in game designers. It may be hard to understand what a game designer is capable to do. Also, not all game designers are able to stand out for the craft. I’ve met people like that who transitioned into other roles.

Every game starts with assumptions. They can be interpretations of market insight or straight fingers pointed at the sky to feel the wind. Assumptions are good to start conversations and show security and vision in early stage, but dangerous for the success of a game. There are successful companies that have in their cultural deck “do not believe any assumption”.

Having people specialized in taking those assumptions and supporting the vision holders to land them down and face reality has a value. These people are professional game designers. In fact, in companies the game designers rarely are the creators of a new product. They are facilitators of game design, that is a role shared among the team.

If you know how to code, that’s enough to make a videogame. If you don’t know it, but you have the money to hire a game developer, you can develop a full game. And if you are sure of your assumptions you can improvise the rest and make a game. There are successful cases that started like this, one I have in my mind right now is Vampire Survivors.

But then there is the reality of the market, of the players out there. And then also the nerdiest anti-social coder will need help on game design.

Same discourse is valid for startup that passed to the growth stage. You may have started making scrappy games filled with ads, and you may assume that you know. But you will need game designers to interpret your (shitty) assumptions and land them down. You need professionals if you want to pass to the growth stage or keep there.

Impossible true stories

Published by Paolo on 27/06/2025

I watched the splendid documentary on Sandfall and Clare Obscure: Expedition 33 made by the Australian YouTube channel SkillUp.

Apart from the obvious learnings on commitment, passion, vision, and so on, I have found 3 important insight:

1. it’s super important to share what you do also as a side hustle out there. You may never know, maybe posting a couple of fan themes on a lost music forum may lead to meet special people to make special things.

2. a possible strategy for disruptive indie/AA games is to include people who never made a game in their entire life. Especially if you employ them in the parts more near of the final client, the player. Art, music, writing.

3. the best indicator that you are making a hit is in your internal playtests. It is something you feel while you play your build everyday, also one that is bad looking. We make games for others to play, but how can you sell people things you don’t actually like and be successful? If you see that everyone in your team is playing the game for fun, you have it.

New Strands

Published by Paolo on 27/06/2025

Last week I have started playing Death Stranding (the first chapter, on PS Plus), and yesterday I have also read an interesting interview to the CEO of Supercell on the need for new type of games. I very much agree with that, so I started connecting the dots.

What console and indie games have that mobile still hasn’t get yet is the “useless beauty”. Things that are not designed or implemented for a specific KPI or data goal. Useless beauty is not that useless to me on the long term, also if you cannot see the immediate benefit. It shows our humanity, and prepares the terrain for cultural and trend settings.

Death Stranding is one of the most impactful experiences I am having in the last 10 year, on gaming side. And it contains a lot of things that make me thing “man, that’s weird, why did you put that?”. Actually, one after another. It’s overwhelming, and beautiful, and it doesn’t explain everything.

Also the last experiments from Supercell, which from a numbers perspective still haven’t found the formula, have something like that. They are much less authorial, the result of a team effort, different purpose, but still. I am sure that Kojima too is willing to make something to be remembered forever, but not played maybe. Different goals, but similar philosophies to me.

I don’t know if they will ever manage to create new genres, but to me the road is correct: not everything must have a direct impact on measures, useless beauty is human and players need wonder, not just mechanics.

Reworks and crossroads

Published by Paolo on 17/03/2025

Hey reader, thank you for being here today too. It’s been a while, I lost an important source of income and rearranged my forces these days. My game Pawtners Case is moving forward but slowly. Briefly speaking

  • I have pitched to a potential investor. They want to see a demo.
  • I sent the pitch to industry friends (if you’re one of them, thank you very much for your feedback again!) and spotted my potential weaknesses
  • I am rearrarging forces and trying to differentiate my business. In fact I cannot rely only on Pawtners Case to stay afloat. I need to find a source of income and also new projects.
  • I am also retaking my programming side, hope to show you something soon.

Good news I am here, healthy and alive. I have my challenges as you do have others for sure, but I am happy! The important thing at crossroards it’s to make a step forward for our rework.

What I learned in the Playable Stories Workshop

Published by Paolo on 03/03/2025

Yesterday, I participated in a workshop on how to write for playable stories. It was a workshop oriented to professional game writers, and I am not. Still, I found it very useful in improving my skills in narrative design.

It was divided into 3 sessions, with pauses in the middle. Session one was about how games change stories. Session two was about how to make stories playable. The last one was about how to use the storytelling toolbox. The tools all writers have and also the tools that belong only to game writers.

The workshop was packed with practical insight and exercises to train for the next days. In Fall 2022, a company I worked for paid for my fee at the narrative department workshop. This gave me access to a series of interesting workshops at a special price. I am thankful for that.

On technical skills

Published by Paolo on 25/02/2025

Let’s talk about technical skills. I read a question around often and sometimes some students ask me: what skills should I have?

The question comes most of the time from our innate desire to fit (gregariousness, submission). There is a job market and we want to get in. This is fair.

As far as I’m concerned, the answer is like learning a new language. If there is no valid reason behind it, we will make a lot of effort to learn it. I learned English to better understand songs and video game stories. I learned Spanish to be able to live where I live. I learned Portuguese because of the culture and history behind Capoeira. I did learn because I felt would improve me as a person.

Likewise, the technical skills I decided to cultivate for game design come from there. Spreadsheets because I have always liked math and put things in order. The most common engines, especially for level design, because it puts me in a state of flow like when I play a video game. Game writing because, as you can see, I love writing. UX/UI because I don’t know how to draw, but I still like to arrange things visually as a form to clarify my ideas.

The question for me is not “which skills should I learn?”, but “which are the technical skills that can help me find my voice and let it come out?”

The main challenge of a professional game designer

Published by Paolo on 24/02/2025

It’s one thing to design a game (or a feature of a game) and another to sell it. This is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn during the career of a game designer.

It’s not just about thinking about systems, mechanics, development context. It’s also about convincing someone to go ahead.

  • If you have the funds, this someone can be a potential player. You have to convince them to play.
  • If you don’t have the funds, but you have a great idea, this someone can be a publisher or an investor.
  • If you work for someone, you have to convince them!

The key point is always in the expectations that one has about something.

  • “I will buy this game for 30 euros because I think I will have a fun time”
  • “I have to invest in this project because I see great possibilities of return”
  • “I approve this design because I think it is the right one for our game”

The biggest challenge is that creatives think on a different level than others.

I’ll give a concrete example with my game Pawtners Case. Lately I’ve been proposing it to try to finance it. It is perceived as a game that is too cheap, and so with little potential. It doesn’t matter that I propose something workable and scalable. Publishers prefer to focus more on something unachievable rather than go step-by-step.

Systems in symphony

Published by Paolo on 20/02/2025

A game is a form of entertainment. Entertainment is fun. Fun is survival. Even though you don’t need to hunt anymore, you still have this kind of instinct that you feel you’d like to improve. A video game allows you to train it without risk. Other forms of entertainment are not interactive, so you aren’t training. But still, you are learning.

When I design a game, the first question is this: For which instincts do I want to prepare a journey to train them? Creating video games means creating fictitious problems. Very often we confuse game design with general design: solving problems for people. Game design solves the need for entertainment but creates problems to do that!

Once the instincts are clear, a series of systems can form the path to their training. It’s like composing a piece of music, you have all the instrumental lines and have to make them act in a symphony.

There has been a lot of talk about “game economies” that pervaded discussions on systems design, but I think of “game symphonies”. Also because certain games do have an economy. Game economists think about the distribution and conversion of virtual resources. Which is vital for certain services to be profitable.

Game designers, instead, are more centered on rhythm, melody, and harmony of systems.

Try Railgods of Hysterra DEMO

Published by Paolo on 15/02/2025

I have had the chance to work on indie games for a year and a half. Many years of working in free-to-play have given me the knowledge, especially in system design, applicable to games with crafting, building, and character growth. I also had the chance to apply techniques I learned by taking narrative design and game writing courses.

The nice thing about indie is that the work is based on solving design problems while remaining consistent with a narrative and gameplay structure. You don’t hear KPIs mentioned, which makes your days more enjoyable.

Another positive thing is that you meet teams that are committed to the game. Generally, you don’t do experiments and you don’t cancel games for not having reached certain numerical results. Games are published, and they can be successful or not. So as a designer, it’s nice to see something that is also yours get published.

One of the games I helped is Railgods of Hysterra. V-Rising meets H.P. Lovecraft. Made with Unreal Engine. You can feed and grow your demonic train and travel the cursed world of Hysterra. I worked for 3 months (usually a client stays with me this time), and I helped with some systems that you can see in the video on my LinkedIn.

The game has a demo available on Steam for FREE, try it! Leave a review, helps out a ton.

A good use case for Claude.ai

Published by Paolo on 13/02/2025

I just paid for the premium subscription to Claude AI. Writing certain design documents took me 3-4 days. With Claude, 1-2.

Like every AI, it freaks out a lot. But this help me get started on tasks. I tell it to write me certain spec, it writes me something full of errors and that helps me think. It’s like teaching to a dumb student.

Then, when I have my document with wireframes, I pass it to it and first I tell it to act as a programmer. Again, it hallucinates but it helps me understand the “edge cases” the empty cases that I hadn’t thought of.

Finally, after a second iteration on the document, I send it again and ask to act as a quality assurance professional, to generate a test plan for me. This helps me think carefully about closing all the loose ends.

This is valuable. Indeed.