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Category: Game Design

Stories come from consciousness

Published by Paolo on 12/02/2025

A guy that I follow on LinkedIn said: “TikTok is already testing TV-like series with 90-second episodes, some titles generating hundreds of thousands of views behind modest paywalls ($5.13 for 10 episodes). Instagram creators are building millions of followers through episodic Reels, while YouTube embraces serialized content on YouTube TV.”

I understand the interest that an AI-generated story can generate.

“hey look at what this new technology is capable of doing!”

In this sense, I understand why there is so much engagement. There is something new and people want to see what it is. There is a long way to go from here to thinking this is the future. The “future” arrives organically, and it is difficult to predict. I work every single day with creativity and storytelling. Like everyone else, I am using tools that promise greater productivity. I am noticing improvements, especially in “unlocking” my mind in certain tasks.

Example: new task, with a poorly defined problem. I send a prompt to Claude, who gives me a wrong and summary answer. I start mentally criticizing the answer, and this makes me think on the right track.

But there is a long way to go from here to thinking that I can create stories that keep people engaged for a long time. These stories come from consciousness. Consciousness is impossible to reproduce in electrical signals because it does not come from there. It comes from something above us.

But that’s my belief.

Playtest what’s wrong to find solutions

Published by Paolo on 11/02/2025

A good way to learn more about your game is to keep something that you see as problematic and playtest it. You will discover the obvious, that you need to fix it. But you will also understand much more things behind that.

It happened to me last week, I had the opportunity of running a playtest for my game. And for it I decided to create a specific control system. The developers said “we don’t feel it right”, and me neither.

At the playtest, everyone told me that the system was unconfortable. But I had to see their struggle to decide to take action in first place. In fact, I could notice how they handled the things and that helped me find the solution.

Creating engagement versus finding motivations

Published by Paolo on 10/02/2025

When you work for others, very often you are assigned to a project led by a marketing person. Most of the time, you are asked to find formulas to create engagement, addiction, or worse.

However, game design is not this. I don’t know how to define this role of engagement-creator, but it is certainly not game design. It is a magician, perhaps. Or manipulator.

When people say that a game is fun, it is because that game has characteristics that make it enjoyable. But you as a designer do not have a crystal ball, you cannot decide that your game will be fun.

What you can do with your work is find the things that motivate players to play more or complete the game (or parts of it) and enhance them.

Game design is not the creation of the magic flute capable of trapping mice and taking them where you want. Game design is finding the treasure of the duende and digging to bring it to light.

Working with Chinese developers

Published by Paolo on 07/02/2025

Since October, I have been working with a company based in Singapore. They hired me as a freelancer for a Telegram instant game, and then we switched to a PC premium game for Steam. Singapore is receiving people from China, they bring their wealth there to be successful.

My teammates are from China, and different regions. I have the pleasure of working with people from a different culture. I am learning a lot, and I want to share some of my early learnings.

The first is their sense of work ethic: they consider the work as a way of contributing to society. They work a lot, also extra hours, because they must do so. Once, I said, “I am sorry, I don’t work on weekends”. I got a private message telling me “Do not work on weekends, ok, but please don’t say it.”

They see themselves as a collective, so if you say you won’t work it’s like you don’t want to support the community.

Second learning: they are very formal and polished in their way of communicating. I use Felo as a real-time translator (they have bad English) during our video meetings. Sometimes archaic expressions pop out. We are so used to the f-word in our colloquial English, we think it’s cool and friendly. Well, not for everyone.

Last, but not least, you should be very clear when something is a suggestion or is an order to execute. If you don’t specify, they will understand that’s an order. They are very vertical in this sense, and it’s hard to have straight conversations with them.

I will keep you updated with new learnings!

LLMs to spot design flaws

Published by Paolo on 04/02/2025

I just discovered another interesting use case for current LLM tools. I use Claude.ai at the moment it’s the best in class. I use the free version.

When you design on a document, let’s say a GDD or a one pager for a feature, you should cover the most possible edge cases. In this way, your coders will have everything pretty much clear by reading the document.

If you submit a document to Claude, then you can ask it to simulate the coding in Unity or Unreal Engine for that GDD. It will spit out pseudo code and reasonings. There will probably be lots of hallucinations and things unuseful. Still, there are good chances to discover something you didn’t considered.

Job applications do not work

Published by Paolo on 31/01/2025

When I was 20 in Naples, it happened that I was with friends and we met unknown people. And we discover some party at a student’s house to sneak in. Sometimes it went well, others we would find ourselves with very different people. Among ourselves, sitting in a corner, sipping the same beer we had bought to join the party.

Today I don’t sneak in anywhere anymore. I like parties, but I prefer the comfort of being with people I already know. Sometimes I go to strangers’ houses, but in general I like to know a sufficient number of people.

The same goes for job hunting. I prefer having groups of friends in the industry and moving with them. I have a job right now because during the first months of my daughter’s life I played Fortnite at night and wanted to learn how to make levels. That’s how I met the person who then put me in the loop. This is the healthiest way to learn about realities and find opportunities.

I need new metaphors for teaching

Published by Paolo on 29/01/2025

The other day I was talking to friends about my teaching experience. This semester I accompanied some students in their “TFG, Trabajo de Final de Grado”. Their thesis, in short. University has changed a lot in recent years, for a whole series of factors. Society has changed since the time I went to university.

We were talking about the most difficult thing about teaching nowadays. I teach game design and development. For me the most difficult thing is actually teaching!

I am a learning facilitator for those who want to learn, rather than someone who actually teaches. Maybe it’s a question of age and experience.

Today the challenge is adapting to a world where information (and teachings) arrive at all hours from many sources that have pervaded our lives.

I can no longer see the story of the master to follow as possible in this world. I am not a person who goes to the mountain to wait for the worthy disciple to climb it and reach the source. For the type of culture (Christian) I come from, I prefer to be a shepherd and be among the sheep.

But this metaphor must change. Sheeps today have a Pandora’s box between their paws, designed to throw everything into their digestive tracts.

Some days are just hard

Published by Paolo on 28/01/2025

The game design is a communication job and it’s hard. Communication is one of the most challenging things, because it has a lot to do with perception. Our perception is the way in which we see reality. And it changes according to many factors.

You write specifications and something important gets ignored or misunderstood. Your duty is to report that. They can blame you for not being clear enough.

Sometimes I accept it, some other times I snap. Communication is also to say to someone when they are wrong.

Beat your limits

Published by Paolo on 22/01/2025

The majority of job offers I see out there look for people who already are in the same area. Having lateral or different experience can be beneficial in a new project, so why is that?

I don’t have the final answer, but I don’t want always the same thing. I worked a lot on mobile free-to-play and now I am working with premium PC. I am happy with that, the results will come I hope.

It’s good to be “incompetent” at something if you have the will to learn. Identify the systems, engage with the players of that kind of games, discover your own limits. And overcome them.

I believe in game education

Published by Paolo on 20/01/2025

A question that I receive a lot is: “do I need to study game development at a University, if I want to become a game developer?”

And my answer is: no, you don’t need to.

Often, there is a follow up question: “do you believe in game education?”

And my answer is: yes, I do.

It may look contradictory, but there is a sense in it. Nowadays, the access to the information useful to get the right education is very wide. Speaking of game development, you can choose to educate in game development:

  1. because it’s a beautiful craft. You will grow as a person like when you study music, literature, math, and other fields
  2. it’s good to understand how something so pervasive as games work to live better
  3. having teachers explaining us the art of game design and development makes us connect with our inner kid.

Those are just three reasons, but there are many more.