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Category: Game Design

Nuances of play and personalized game design

Published by Paolo on 15/05/2024

A game designer thinks in the players, not in the game itself. The game is a medium to deliver a playful experience.

Every game designer has some extra to bring to the players. It can be a narrative quality or a special eye for the game feel. Maybe a good reading of spaces to design levels, or the special capacity to abstract in systems.

The first important thing is to get to know it with time. The second is that in game design everything is a system. The system thinking is critical.

When we design a game, though, we design for archetypes or personas. We design for some common denominator. And then the game arrives to real people, the Players. And everyone has their singularities.

It arrives with controls, interfaces, sounds, colors, perception load, and things that are experienced on a very personal level. Each one of us is different, so nuance makes all the difference.

What fascinates me about the clear trend of technology right now, not only LLMs, is the possibility of having a personal game designer for every player, somehow.

If we focus on the real job (system thinking with a personal extra approach) there is the chance to instruct a machine to deliver a personal experience.

Is the machine capable of changing the nuance to meet every single player’s needs?

Think simply in a level balance: too hard for Peter, too easy for Molly.

What if it can be adapted to offer the right challenge to everyone?

My feeling right now oscillates between negativity and positivity, don’t take me for a blind enthusiast.

When I read how the copyright has been assaulted to train certain models, I wanted to retire on a mountain and make offline indie games using VIM on Linux.

Still, the possibility of being capable of meeting each one of my player’s tastes is definitely exciting. Because, at the end of the day, that’s my duty as a game designer.

Small nuances in game design

Published by Paolo on 06/05/2024

I am playing Squad Busters intensively these days. Hopefully, this game will work because it contains many elements I have been working on with another project up to last year (under NDA).

I am glad when top developers make certain design choices that I proposed or I was guessing but I didn’t have enough time to complete. “Please, Paolo, focus on this other task” is a classic when I start insisting on some point. It’s like when a singer sings exactly your feelings. Satisfying!

But I was also thinking of something else. I was in the middle of an intense moment. A player with a squad better than mine was chasing me. I didn’t have enough coins to open the chest, so I used a booster to open it.

And it reminded me of a quote from J. Riccitiello: “When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time”.

I remember that everyone hated that, the only difference was that Mr. R. was pitching a power-up instead of a booster.

(In the jargon adopted by the companies I have worked with, boosters are the ones you buy BEFORE a match, while you can get or create power-ups DURING the match)

The reality of things is that we like to win, as players. And we can also pay for that. I respect the choice of putting this element on a strategic level and not on a tactical one. The latter would have upset too many people.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how a small nuance can make all the difference in game design. So that also a bad (in the sense of evil) idea can be played well if we have the right time and resources to work on it.

I completed my deck

Published by Paolo on 02/05/2024

Thanks to the help of two friends I have completed my deck to send as introduction to companies.

“Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are ‘costs’.”

(P. Drucker)

This is valid, to me, for every business, also small like mine. Over the last couple of years that I have dedicated to helping gaming companies with innovation, I had to learn a lot about marketing and innovate my business myself.

I could have gone easier with my proposal: “I make levels for your game”, “I write narratives for your game”, “I will fix your tutorials”, or “I will create FPS maps for your game”. But I am not a specialist! I have worked on so many projects that I consider myself skilled in starting them.

Do you need to lay down your vision for a new project? I am your man. My specialization is in innovation. As many game designers out there, the vast majority of games I have worked on were never published. This is the reality of our business.

I can predict lots of issues and tackle them before it’s too late. My analogy capacity make me create new things with few elements. And I touch everything: systems, gameplay, levels and narrative. I also build in engine.

Hypercasual was R&D with glamour

Published by Paolo on 24/04/2024

Now that the “hypercasual” word is not cool anymore, let’s talk about the benefits of R&D (which is a term for dinos, at this point).

Research and development in video games leads to the discovery of new technologies, mechanics, dynamics, and narratives. It is an activity that is hard to integrate within a business, especially in high-competitive environments.

I helped a couple of years a developer of hypercasual games and, in the end, to me, that was a little miracle. Why? Because for the first time in my career, I saw the fruit of R&D becoming an actual, shippable product. The CEO was happy, the developer was happy, and the marketer was happy.

Proposals were coming directly from publishers following trends, there were syntheses of popular indie and AAA gameplays. There was also heavy research on social/viral trends. I felt a volcano of ideas, that was a good period professionally speaking.

And it was because of the collision of 3 hacks: the CEO could save money thanks to the Unity Asset Store, developers could save time and the marketer could use concrete techniques to reach the hypercasual audience.

Many Players of hypercasual games were tech-savvy and very smart. They loved to find the flaws in these prototypes and they had fun in discovering how to become a “hacker”. They went very deep into the rules (which were the only elements well thought out) and they found a way of cracking them.

A breath of fresh air in a context where timers, special offers, and artificial scarcity were playing with their compulsivity!

Today the business model is gone, because it is not possible anymore to target directly these people with ads. It’s much more expensive to reach them so the little you make with ad monetization doesn’t cover the costs.

But these Players are still there, waiting for super innovative mechanics to break. Shipping “R&D games” every 2 weeks is still an available choice.

ATTPP a new KPI

Published by Paolo on 15/04/2024

Many companies take one assumption for granted: regulars, people who play every single day, are the most willing to spend. This has always been said to me and I have never questioned it. The number of regulars, or its percentage, it’s an important indicator of the success of a service.

This leads the whole team to craft things to convince more and more people to become regulars. Many of them are dark patterns, which work in the short term. Never seen any study on the impact on the long term, of course. Game development is not science, it’s business after all.

This information comes from product and marketing. Companies invest money in advertisements to get a concrete return. Return On Advertisement Spending, ROAS.

Today I want to challenge that. To me, it’s impossible (read a miracle, too) to achieve success without good marketing. Marketing is important to identify an audience and its dimensions as well as make the product arrive at them.

However, the reasons for failure relate very often to game design and production. You need good game design and production to build on the right motivations.

In f2p every time I balance an economy I do it starting from minutes as the basic unit for fun. I have never seen in my entire professional life the ATTPP, Average Total Time Per Player as KPI.

The total time an average Player plays your game before quitting should intuitively be the most important thing to measure!

In my view, measuring that will shift the focus towards the fun. Maybe not a good strategy for big successes, we have best practices for that. Still, a good measure for when things are still small.

Progress and difficulty

Published by Paolo on 12/04/2024

I am reading a paper on personalized difficulty in games and I see this graph:

The graph shows clearly that the probability of playing tomorrow depends on how many levels (amount of progress) you beat today.

At GDC24 one of the talks showed this graph:

Kills in 10 matches of a FPS will influence the probability of playing again.

What can we learn from here?

  • Theory of Flow is always valid
  • It’s about the Player: the player of your game should feel good enough and progressing enough. It’s about them, not you!
  • You need to deeply understand the elements of friction, goals and mechanics that shape up the difficulty of your game.

The present of videogames

Published by Paolo on 11/04/2024

In 1998, me and my brother were waiting outside of a video games shop, in Naples. The owner promised us on the telephone that the game would have arrived for the opening, the next day.

The game was “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”. Its cost was 120k lire. With the inflation and everything, today would have a cost of 100,52 euros – source

The game was made by a team of more than 200 people and a budget of over $12 million. – source

Today, games with that level of quality have a higher budget and are sold for less money. That’s because of a lot of factors, it’s not simply one reason or another.

Videogames yesterday

In 1998 video games were one of the things that shaped our future as persons. Playing The Legend of Zelda was a life-changing experience. And it was much easier for that Nintendo 64 in our room to catch our attention. We had no smartphones and no socials. We had guitars, a PC with a weak connection, school books, and lots of board games.

The controls of that game were simpler than the controls of the vast majority of AAA games nowadays. The console was offline, you had the game running in less time than today with your PS5. Everything was so simple and so memorable.

Videogames today

Today we have two main challenges, as game creators:

  • The discoverability of our games. There is no friction anymore in making and releasing a game.
  • Games are not the super hot thing anymore. Today there are many drivers of culture, influencers and streamers for instance.

I remember when I read about Zelda on Megaconsole, an Italian zine dedicated to Nintendo games. Nowadays, people have no right to focus on a single article without getting spammed by lots of ads and notifications of sorts.

Combat, puzzles, exploration: the promise was unique. Today, I see Zeldas over and over

I remember my eyes popping out of my head when I saw Soul Calibur running on an imported JAP Dreamcast in front of my eyes. The effect is not the same when you watch trailers on YouTube. Games have lost that spark they had when they were pushing the technology and the boundaries.

How to fix that wicked problem?

The future of video games passes by offering Players real life-changing experiences. Players should come out of a game better than they entered. This passes by really curating the content somehow.

At least, that was the promise. Try to sell a game for 100 euros these days, and see what the people will write about your prices. Why? Because of the value they give to the games today, compared to the value we gave them in the past.

Virtual shops should focus on leaving to the influencers the curation of their content. Imagine opening Steam and having tips from the streamers you love. That’s probably the first step. Steam and other shops should never filter people out, but it would be great for everyone to have a reliable curation of content.

But also we, designers and developers, should try to only push out things that matter at least to us. When I meet someone working for a company with a proper contract, too often I see a bored person who is just doing a job.

We have lost that push that differentiate our sector. We need more passionate professionals, preferably with a broader range of skills. We need to build games on top of what can really improve the life of people through fun.

I am not sure that would solve the issue, but if Players are able to find their games and these games will change their lives a little, also with a simple smile, that’s the way to me.

Game design is facilitation not tactics

Published by Paolo on 10/04/2024

Game design is not a narrow world with stable structures. It is an activity where you cannot apply tactics and win the game somehow. You need to think broadly. You need to understand the culture and the past of the genre you are working on. You need basic psychology knowledge to understand human motivation.

That’s why it’s so hard to build and keep a video game company. The successful ones in the past managed to change things, reading the needs and the behaviors. Today you can recognize a bad company since the hiring process.

When a company sends you a technical test, they want to see if you know the formula. They have no time (they think they don’t) to interview you properly. To me, a designer needs to receive a technical test: but live!

That’s because game design is not about tactics. I mean, good game design. The issue is that when a company is led by business people, as it always happens, they look for formulas. They want to just express their vision and you, the designer, apply the right formula to move the project forward. And then the game reaches poor results, but it’s a market issue, Apple changed the rules, and so on.

Good game designers are professionals who know how to walk into the adventurous world of game development. We are facilitators, we facilitate the act of game design among a team. We want to change the culture, somehow.

When you call us just to make money, well… you get the kind of game designer that later in the career becomes a product manager. Nothing bad, of course, it’s just that I don’t fit in all this story.

Hyper-casual is still an opportunity

Published by Paolo on 08/04/2024

The hyper-casual business model is dead, but I believe that hyper-casual games are still very attractive. The real challenge is to find a suitable model for these games with little friction and complexity.

During the golden years of hyper-casual, the gold rush pushed many people to forget the basics of game design. With a couple of clients, I have seen in first person the sloppiness of businesses in making games.

One game per week was the mantra. Just do it! Test the CPI. D1 retention is too low: out! Next one!

This is not how good games are made, of course. I believe that hyper-casual games met the need of lots of Players but then they didn’t understood them. The business model is dead because of this lack of empathy. This in the name of fast earnings.

False promises

The promise of hyper-casual was to have an instantly playable lightweight games. A snackable, high engaging experience based in low perception effort. This translates into a high retention at the start.

But then the games are filled with ads with no specific connection with the game itself. At the same time, the experience is not refined after the first days. The result is a drop in players. Imagine, you spent actual money to make the people install your game. And they go after a while.

Companies started to make everything to lower the acquisition cost and increase the ads seen per player. That was the first, and wrong, solution to the problem. The good approach, instead, would have been starting from understanding how to serve better the Players.

The second issue with hyper-casual games have been that they were very easy to clone. The mechanics were so simple to copy. Probably, a competitive advantage would have been to focus on mechanical friction hard to imitate. To make an example, souls-like games are hard to make. The same is valid for good match-3 games.

When a game is boring is because the mechanic has no deepness, or that its deepness has not been explored enough. This causes to the game to be repetitive, and so Players will quit.

The solution to this challenge is to start from the passion for games and social engagement that part of the hyper-casual players had. Look at this data:

You can see that Players are also playing more complex and online games. This is indicative that something can be done to properly serve them without treating them like ad-watchers, clockwork orange style.

Starting from where they love, the games they play and simplify them. Try to find the essence of battle royale, arcade, role playing games. That would have been a success.

  • Is it necessary to have a different character for every silly minigame? Maybe the Player can have a chosen group of avatars represented in different behaviors and mechanics.
  • Which mechanics from hardcore games can be synthesized in a simple game?
  • The game can open in more complex mechanics based on different frictions: start from the mechanical, but then add informational or strategic.

I used two old reports from Facebook and Pangle+Newzoo to make my reflections. Images are taken from there.

Refusal as a generative act

Published by Paolo on 06/04/2024

Let’s talk about refusal as a generative act. The refusal has something similar to the design, to me. It identifies issues and creates new opportunities.

Right now in my industry, it’s a moment of change and challenges. Dramatic, somehow. But this is where things can change for the better. Refusal is a great tool we have.

I am reading on my feed dozens of posts written by people with huge experience who have been laid off. Now, these people are looking for work. It reminds me a little bit of the classic royal rumbles I watched on my television when I was a kid. Macho Man VS Hulk Hogan VS Ultimate Warrior… you get that! The most muscled guys in the world fake-fighting for a shiny belt.

Am I willing to join that? No, of course not! I can support this or that stunt, but I refuse to be in the ring. I am the guy with the big hand glove in the background, I love their spirit. But I am not joining that!

And this creates other opportunities for me. I work mostly with people who are starting to build new companies. People who are exploring a vision. There are lots of them, more than profitable companies for sure. There is a lot of work to do. And the more I help them, the more things I learn, the more I can help others.

And the best jobs I have had in my career, I mean full-time regular jobs, have started from this spark. Creativity, making games together. Not screening, filtering, testing, trying, questioning, and all these blockers.

That’s how, through the refusal of the standard processes, I keep and foster my passion for making games.

First screening with a web logical test? Not gonna happen. Unpaid home assignment? Not for me. More than 3 rounds of interviews? I am out.

Let’s meet for 2 hours in a room with a dashboard and a spreadsheet. Introduce me first to the producer and only at the end to the HR manager. Show me you’re looking for experience, design, and concreteness. Show me you want to make games.

I have created this post originally for LinkedIn. But then I removed it from there, because it can be read in wrong ways too.

Let’s talk about refusal as a generative act. The refusal has something similar to the design, to me. It identifies issues and creates new opportunities.

Right now in my industry, it’s a moment of change and challenges. Dramatic, somehow. But this is where things can change for the better. Refusal is a great tool we have.

I am reading on my feed dozens of posts written by people with huge experience who have been laid off. Now, these people are looking for work. It reminds me a little bit of the classic royal rumbles I watched on my television when I was a kid. Macho Man VS Hulk Hogan VS Ultimate Warrior… you get that! The most muscled guys in the world fake-fighting for a shiny belt.

Am I willing to join that? No, of course not! I can support this or that stunt, but I refuse to be in the ring. I am the guy with the big hand glove in the background, I love their spirit. But I am not joining that!

And this creates other opportunities for me. I work mostly with people who are starting to build new companies. People who are exploring a vision. There are lots of them, more than profitable companies for sure. There is a lot of work to do. And the more I help them, the more things I learn, the more I can help others.

And the best jobs I have had in my career, I mean full-time regular jobs, have started from this spark. Creativity, making games together. Not screening, filtering, testing, trying, questioning, and all these blockers.

That’s how, through the refusal of the standard processes, I keep and foster my passion for making games.

First screening with a web logical test? Not gonna happen. Unpaid home assignment? Not for me. More than 3 rounds of interviews? I am out.

Let’s meet for 2 hours in a room with a dashboard and a spreadsheet. Introduce me first to the producer and only at the end to the HR manager. Show me you’re looking for experience, design, and concreteness. Show me you want to make games.