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Category: Game Design

System designers, learn board games design!

Published by Paolo on 11/05/2022

If you really want to learn how to design game systems, I recommend starting from board games.

System designers are rare and in high demand in the industry. Especially with the advent of new business models and technologies, people capable of breaking down a game into systems and finding the connections between them are really rare and highly appreciated.

The temptation when starting to design systems is to start by opening a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is by far the most used tool for game development. However, there is no need to open it from the start. When you start thinking about breaking a game down, it is best to use all your senses. Better to use touch and sight, above all.

The best way to start thinking in a system is therefore to prototype the system in the form of a board game. When you work as a game designer your job is to study games that already exist. Also to carry out this very important task, I recommend that you synthesize the video game in question (or the more interesting parts of it) into a board game to really understand all its parts.

Creating board games could save you months of development and playtesting!

Everything a Game Designer must know

Published by Paolo on 27/04/2022

A LinkedIn contact shared a mind map that summarises, from his point of view, everything a game designer needs to know.

Link to the original post

His post was shared and appreciated by many professionals in the sector.

In my opinion, instead, the image is misleading. It just looks at one part of game development: free-to-play business. Free-to-play is only part of a very complex world ranging from board games to virtual reality. I know many people in Europe who are dedicated to the development of indie games and I can assure you that, for example, the “Data” part is ignored by them.

This mind map contains what free-to-play game companies expect from a game designer. Which is very different from the declared purpose.

A person with in-depth knowledge in all of these areas is very likely to feel the work of a game designer frustrating. If I know the game-as-a-service business like the back of my hand, I will continually make proposals that probably won’t be heard. Frustration leads many game designers to jump to other roles, such as product management. Pure game designers, instead, are dedicated to something else!

When you work in free-to-play you gain knowledge in all these areas, but a game designer who does his job well devotes himself to two main activities:

  1. Facilitate tools in the team to decide how the game works
  2. Involve the people who will be playing the games in the process

Facilitate game design tools

The game designers are those who help define:

  • the game systems
  • the way in which the story reaches the players
  • the experience in the game levels
  • the actions necessary to activate the mechanics.

System design, narrative design, level design and gameplay design. In the case of free-to-play: economy design, content design, level design and UX design.

It is good to know the business side and the data side to be informed about what to do, but it is very important to be able to realise the very experience you want to offer people in the game. The necessary qualities are of a technical, artistic and editorial nature.

  1. Create and use spreadsheets, touch JSON files and game engines (technical).
  2. Set up a process, help define the essence of your experience and study well the armony of all the elements of your game (artistic).
  3. Document everything and write stories both for internal inspiration and for the Players (editorial).

Involve people

Too often, busy with many daily tasks, team members forget the main component of a commercial video game: the Players.

Most video games in production will not be commercially successful for exactly this reason. The task of game designers is to involve real people constantly to test the assumptions you have about the players and the market. A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. You need to go outside, watch people play the game and have meaningful conversations with them.

Product managers, programmers and artists don’t have the time to do this. It is up to the game designers to take care of this. If you don’t, the work comes down to constant deliveries over long periods of time and then comes to nothing. It happens very often.

Conclusion

Game design is a very complex activity, but the role of game designers is very practical and creative. It is about analysing the games and helping the team to define the tools to create the game. Then you will create gaming experiences using these tools.

It is good to know a little bit of everything. Of course, if you want to have a meaningful discussion with a product manager you should speak the language of the business. If, on the other hand, you want to have a conversation with the art director, learning about the history of art and the theory of colours can help you a lot.

But let’s never forget the fundamentals. We game designers do a very practical job!

A game is a language

Published by Paolo on 26/04/2022

A few days ago I said to a student “a game is, after all, a language to deliver a story”. He objected: “Not all games have a story!”. The student was right, but his objection is due to the semantic context of the term “story”.

A story can be a component of a game, generally expressed through its contents. By interacting with the game mechanics, players create a narrative. There are many games without a story, but the sequence of actions and events always creates a narrative. That piece you were waiting for finally appears and saves your game of Tetris. You were losing, now you have been saved by fate. If someone told the story of your match, this event would be part of it.

A story is also the path that brought your game to where it is. Your live game is constantly updated and this creates a story. The core of your player community will know your story through the various updates.

A story can also arrive absolutely asynchronously. A few years ago I discovered what was behind titles like Super Mario and Zelda. The creator of these games brought his personal childhood story to the players.

A story can also be created on other platforms thanks to your game. Some people use whole games, or parts of them, to create entertainment for other people.

Player’s Advocate

Published by Paolo on 22/04/2022

The other day I was talking to a colleague. He tells me “you don’t have to worry about the decisions that come up, just think about doing your job. What they tell you to do. “. This for me is the best way to have mediocre products, designed for mediocre people with something to spend. Do your job right, just do what they tell you to do.

Game designers very often are exactly like that. True game design includes, instead, keeping promises to players. Game designers connect with players’ fantasies and offer them the experience they are looking for.

Game designers understand that a “daily bonus” is not gameplay, but simply a feature. They understand this and struggle to pass this concept on to those above as well. If your game as a service has been releasing only features and not gameplay for months, guess what: you have a problem!

If you are this type of designer, you quickly realize that the most important thing in your job is to make sure you create great products and services. Because a game is a language to tell a story. And this story must be true.

Your job is to get people to work on publishing a great game. Not garbage. No shortcuts.

If you are not the Player’s Advocate who will be?

You may target a niche if your game is inherently multiplayer

Published by Paolo on 20/04/2022

When creating a free-to-play game you have two choices. Either you target a very large audience trying to structure the entire player journey to make sense for many months, or you play a game that lets you get to know other people right away and let them build their campfires.

In this second case, an inherently multiplayer game, it is possible to target a niche and build a successful service. Even if it is difficult to compete with the realities that handle more complex services where contents and levels are released every two weeks. You will probably not being a top grossing. Still your service can sustain a meaningful business and last years.

Whatever is your target, ask yourself some questions and make decisions:

  • Gameplay: What is the backbone of your service? How does it guide the rest of the game’s features?
  • Economy: How much is a game minute worth in currency?
  • UX: how do you accompany the player throughout the whole experience?
  • Level design: how do you estimate and measure the relationship between fail rate and drop off when designing levels?
  • Narrative design: in what moments of experience do deliver your story?

Players may be tired of throwing their money at gem packs

Published by Paolo on 19/04/2022

According to the Sensor Tower service and some specialised media, the benefits generated by free-to-play smartphone games have decreased. Specifically, spending on the Apple platform is under 2.3%. On Android there was a dramatic decline of 13.8%.

Experts from around the world are also questioning Sensor Tower’s estimation capability. In short, these estimates could be wrong. As a game designer, I have one, single and simple doubt: are free-to-play games for smartphones losing novelty?

Historically, video games have always thought of pushing the limits of graphics and gameplay. If we look at the premium market, with a simple glance we can see how technological progress has supported the evolution of game modes in a superb way. Even there, however, companies have begun to bet on the safe side. That’s why we see so many sequels, remakes, etc.

I’ve been downloading and trying tons of free-to-play games every week for years. I remember when I started in this video game sector, in 2012. The Pareto Principle was applied in a more courageous way: 80% copying a game, 20% introducing new things. This trend has changed lately.

Free-to-play, in order to be sustainable, needs a huge volume of players. To make this possible, acquisition campaigns need to focus on finding a very large audience. Before Apple’s IDFA deprecation, it was possible to find audiences based on concrete actions. “I would like to have inside the people who paid in this other game”. “I would like people who complete the tutorial of these games.”

This led to a new application of the Pareto Principle: 80% copying from one game, 20% copying from another. You avoid risks, you play “safe” in theory.

The result: the games that we see in top grossing are, from a gameplay perspective, always the same. Human beings certainly do not want complete and revolutionary experiences. However, we need to see continuous evolutions, or we will no longer feel attracted to what the market offers us.

A pop-up comes up with an affordable pack of gems, boosters, and some new heroes. The same type of package I bought in 3, 5, 10 games. The novelty effect of long-term gets lost.

How could we try to solve this?

  • Accepting that it is better to aim at a very large audience and, once inside the game, create different experiences for different type of player personas
  • At the same time, put at the center of your game experience something really fresh
  • Try to create games that can be accessed by multiple devices, not just smartphones, to ensure the service scalability.

Pareto principle in videogames conception

Published by Paolo on 28/02/2022

The basic use of the 80-20 rule (Pareto’s principle) in video games is to copy the 80% of a successful or promising game in order to mitigate some of the risks involved in investing time, effort and money in developing it.

Then you have 20% of freedom, where you can put your own secret sauce to the cake.

The risks of this approach come when you do not understand WHY a certain competitor works out there. It may be a successful marketing case. Maybe a special UX is what makes it great. A great level or narrative design may be making the difference. Hard to tell if you do not know basically three things:

The first thing is to deconstruct competitors,

The second thing is to run playtests with competitors games,

The third thing is to study the audience of competitors in a meaningful way.

Clash of Clans: Forest Path for Brita

Published by Paolo on 10/02/2022

First of all I dissected the current tutorial of Clash of Clans.

Then I took a deep reflection on that tutorial.

Then I sketched the new Villager: Brita.

Today I used the forest paths method by Alexander Swords to sketch out a new narrative arc for a possible new tutorial. You can find here an introduction to the method.

So that I reflected on what the Player is doing and what the new villager, Brita, should do during the tutorial. My high concept formula is this:

see bigger here

As we said, Brita is a trader and a jewelry maker. She will onboard, teach and reward players. She will manage Gems, Gold and also the five magicians. Her main obstacles are the Goblins who want her gold. Her gold is important to her life, so that she will be pretty distrustful toward the Player at tutorial start.

Then I passed to sketch the narrative forest for Brita, based on that:

see bigger here

I love this method because it directly puts in relationship the story with all activities, resources, obstacles and goals.

The new tutorial story will be a story about trust and confidence. You, the Player, are the new Chief of the village. First thing you will do will be to collect gold! Brita will not like, it’s HER gold. During the story, you will successfully defend the village from the Goblin attack and also demostrate her you can lead your troops.

courtesy of clashofclans.fandom.wiki

The Grand Warden represents the Mages and this collective is very important to Brita. In fact, a new detail on the lore will be that Mages are capable of transforming everything in gold. And, as we said, gold is very important for Brita.

The Player will successfully past a trial given from the Grand Warden itself, and Brita will finally have confidence in the new Chief of the village.

Now we have a concept for our new tutorial, next step is to define it!

Learning from the history

Published by Paolo on 09/02/2022

I learn about game design more from the history of videogames than from podcasts, videos and experts speaking about the next big thing.

One has to really know how things were made back then.

Documents like this one are pure gold.

New aesthetics, dinamics and mechanics for blockchain games

Published by Paolo on 08/02/2022

The discourse regarding new technologies is very polarized. On the one hand, I see a lot of highly skilled people joining the financial gaming movement, games where you can make money. On the other hand, I see a hatred on the part of some people not only for the question itself, but also towards the creators.

For me, attacking those who are trying to create something new is definitely a mortal sin. The creator is a very often courageous person. She may be attracted to easy money, why not. But no one gives us the right to attack the creator. The creator is always the one who drives our industry forward.

In all the online noise, interesting qualities of the games that base a part of the service on blockchain are starting to be defined. Let’s see some of them using the false line of the MDA framework.

Aesthetics

The question of being an investor for me is the natural consequence of the worldwide trend of recent years of being able to leave comments on any detail of anything. If in the future people can also feel like investors in a product, it will be very interesting for a lot of people.

Feeling the real power of helping to start and grow a project is absolutely fun. These hundreds of Discord game channels dedicated to videogames that don’t yet exist prove it. Quite often they have more people talking every day than Discord channels of games that already exist.

The community plays a key role, in the future we will see in companies that these communities will be treated as a separate product.

Dynamics

Understanding how the heck a decentralized gaming system works is complicated. You have to read documents, get information, create virtual wallets and even play a little on the cryptocurrency exchange. This thing is fun!

In fact, the real game is right there. Very often we see games that are bad copies of f2p games. Nonetheless, people go there and play. Obviously the possibility of earning money, but also the fact of fiddling with all these new tools creates fun dynamics that bring people together.

The real game is the marketplace, it is that part that needs to be playfully enhanced.

Mechanics

All data flow is very transparent on these platforms. There is also a very interesting loss of anonymity. It will be possible to prevent some forms of abuse that are committed by malicious players, if they lose their anonymity.

Also very interesting are the mechanics that allow people to be rewarded for contributing to the community. As an f2p game designer that I am, I have heard several times advice from some hardcore gamers on how to improve the economy.

These games will allow players to create their own currencies in the future. This is absolutely sane and interesting from a gameplay standpoint.

Whenever we criticize something, someone can answer us and give us an opportunity to learn.
Every time we attack someone, however, we lose the opportunity to drink from a source.