Skip to content

Category: Games Research

King is reviving Twisted Metal

Published by Paolo on 07/07/2022

Latest announcement by King is a branding campaing dressed as call for playtest.

I mean, how cool is that? I really believe that Twisted Metal had to be revived somehow. And it seems that now there is a good opportunity for that.

The visual promise has high quality. The question as always will be “will my phone support that?”. I still remember the 15 GB of Diablo Immortal, that I had to uninstall immediately sadly.

The game will be PvP, so that I guess the main monetization driver will be cosmetics and seasons. I love PvP games, I believe that there are huge opportunities there. I also believe that nowadays you cannot afford to develop a pvp game only for mobile phone.

Nowadays there is the game. And the game should be accessible from everywhere. So that I am waiting for PC and Console versions. I am an old gamer, so that I hate virtual pads!

Why I believe that this will probably work?

  • I believe that multiplayer competitive games (if well made, of course) are the ones with the best retention
  • I believe that King has contacts with the gatekeepers (Apple and Google) and can easily be featured on their stores
  • I believe a game like this is really loved internally. And when the teams love something, that something has more success chances.

How to create a repository of the games we play

Published by Paolo on 24/11/2021

I learned a technique that I use a lot from a YouTube video of an industry expert. The technique is called brickfile and is an excellent tool to research and internalize some aspects of a game that we are studying and analyzing.


When I play a new title, I always record game sessions and upload them to my YouTube channel. In the case of mobile games, I wait for a session on day 3 and try to record at least 40 minutes of play by going through all possible screens.
Save snapshots of the gameplay video, watching it again. I use VLC for this operation which allows you to save snapshots using the SHIFT + S combination

vlc snapshots
Take all the snaps and pass them to the PureRef program, which is free and allows you to view them in the form of a grid.

PureRef
Brickfile is the name of this format, and is very useful for future reference. You can easily check the various features of a game and use each snapshot for wireframes, too. In fact, from PureRef you can easily copy and paste into other programs such as Inkscape!


I have created a public repository on GitHub where I will upload my brickfiles. It would be great if it were a collaborative project!