Nothing and no one can take imagination away from us. New technologies can certainly allow a person to multiply productivity. This will inevitably lead entrepreneurs to hire fewer people.
The world before the invention of spreadsheets needed less skilled labor. Elevators were driven by a person. Those jobs are not available anymore. C’est la vie.
The human being will always be irreplaceable in the imagination. Worry about your imagination and let the machines do the repetitive work.
Working on a game that will have to enter a very crowded market, the so-called red ocean, involves a certain degree of challenge.
When you enter a market full of competitors on one side it means that there are customers willing to pay. But it means that it is necessary to solve some problems to have a chance of success.
The alternative is to look for virgin markets, blue oceans, but very often this is because some genre in question does not move much interest. We can create a first-person platform for mobile devices since none are in top200 grossing. There aren’t any because people don’t care. Sometimes it’s better to go to already populated markets, especially if we have an idea of what to improve.
Take the case of Royal Match, a top-notch match-3 that was released when the puzzle market felt overcrowded.
The result is an agile, fast game, perfect for mobile. It doesn’t matter that he entered a red ocean market, he made it because he understood his audience well.
Many teams choose to remain followers. They study a market and copy here and there, hoping to secure a piece of the pie. In the process, they don’t even understand the reason for some choices. Years go by, goals are not achieved, and people are fired.
During the job interview, you must inform yourself well about the projects.
In the next few years Virtual Reality is going to offer memorable experiences to the World. I am pretty sure of that, because a lot of money is being invested in the development of those technologies and the most brilliant minds are gathering to work on that.
But I am also pretty sure that the Virtual Reality based on head-mounted displays will never be as big as some tech leader is expecting. It is not because of the price of those, it is not because the motion sickness that will be progressively solved.
It is because as humans we have the survival instinct. Which is why we play games, too. We play games to improve our chances of surviving in the envirnoment. We play to improve our skills. That is basically what we mean when we use the expression “having fun”.
Survival instinct involves many things, among them keeping our body safe. A lot of us smoke cigarettes, that is definitely not keeping our organ safe. But we are doing because the damage is on the long term, so that we live in the illusion that “it can happen, but also not”.
With an headset on, instead, we are covering our eyes. Our instinct will always be to feel unsafe. That is no solution for that, apart from leaving the environment visible with glasses. That is why head-mounted display based VR will never have a massive reach.
I am thinking on my past with the lens of “why that thing didn’t worked out?” those days. It is an useful exercise to do at times. I have a diary and I like to take old entries and read them with my new point of view.
Finding a good leader is a gift from God. Very often we have to deal with creative leaders that are not creative at all, managers that repeat your job and in general people that want to impose their (often wrong) views.
A great leader almost never says “no”. Best leaders you can find out there, in fact, are capable of taking any of the proposals and discussions from the team and use it as an opportunity for the growth of the entire team. Let’s say I am working on Super Mario Bros 4 and I have the “brilliant” idea of putting long dialogues between level and level. That’s clearly wrong, right? Why is it? A good leader can reason with me simply making me describing well the idea. Then is myself that can realize “ok, not a great one”. The same is valid for very tiny questions.
A bad leader believes that the job is “know when to say no”. When you meet someone like this, believe me: this person will probably make the whole project fail. No one knows when to say no, in fact. The no from a leader is a way of shut down a communication and gives no opportunities to grow. What are the best assets for a company? Teams are! Do not cut them off with a NO. Never.
A good leader recognizes when the house is on fire and try to put the focus of the whole team on the problem. The team or part of it must extinguish the fire. Otherwise the house will. It’s very important maintain the calm but being honest at the same time. In case of fire, every member should participate or at least stay aware of it. Try to burn the smallest number of people.
A bad leader shows that everything is great at any meeting. The important thing for them is to stay positive. That person is not interested in the team and the product at all. That “leader” is just interested in taking the salary each month and having the title on the resume. Saying that is all good, until everything falls down. Then they will have the perfect excuse: the project was great, but the company shut down. Not my fault. New companies will see their resumes and see that they were in a leadership position for a while. Someone will hire them again, probably.
If you are Picasso, you can share just two lines on a blank page and the people will feel the meaning of your art. I ask you: are you like Picasso?
I write this because junior game designers willing to join the industry often do this: they share uncompleted things or just some capture with a game engine opened and two blocks in the Scene. This is NOT how you show your talent to the World out there. This is noise, ego and insecurity.
I know you are struggling because it is very hard to get a job as junior. Believe me, I lived the same years ago. You want to get noticed by recruiters and maybe managers and CEOs. Sharing the first draft of a level means that you opened the engine and you put blocks in a scene. Just this.
I can see nothing interesting in those posts.
The worst happens when social challenges like Blocktober appear. I am completely in favor of those challenges! I took those challenges in the past and I will probably take them in the next future who knows. But the results of those challenges are not something worth sharing on a professional network nor on your portfolio. Those are for you to improve, not for the others to see. If you are junior you should work hard everyday on your talent. Do not complete tasks just for the sake of showing off.
I did the same, years ago. It meant nothing. Believe me.
With true love,
Paolo
As a great percentage of game designers out there, I really admire and respect Hideo Kojima. He has a big ego, he doesn’t speak one word outside Japanese but still he managed to introduce many innovations to the medium.
The main advantage of mister Kojima is probably also his greatest weakness. He didn’t managed to become a movie director and he adapted many things from movies and books to the games mediums.
Today the first episode of his new podcast was published on Spotify:
I like that he explains exactly WHY he helped creating the stealth genre. It is very interesting to hear his chain of thoughts. He acted like a true designer: he understood a genre (shooters or shooting games) and he had a personal tought on storytelling . Shooters of the time, in fact, had no story. No reason why to kill enemies.
Plus, technical limitations on MSX gaming system made impossible having many shots at the same time. So that Mr. Kojima, starting from a personal thought and using the limitation as creative leverage, created the perfect excuse to eliminate enemies: infiltration, heroism.
I like a lot that, before of answering the question regarding the secret of MGS’s success, first thing he says is: I don’t know. Then he starts to reason. Very humble attitude, hard to see out there.
I would like to wish huge success to this new initiative by Mr. Kojima!
I see a lot of professionals getting a name in the industry working on successful projects. Then they decide to go indie. And they do the exactly same thing they were doing at the mother company, but with less resources. After a while, they return back to some corp. Classic.
One of the things I always suggest to the people I mentor is this: do not remake things you already did before. I am not sure it is the right way of thinking, honestly. It is just mine.
To me, remaking stuff is always a mistake. Maybe the thing you want to remake is an old experiment that failed for some reason. Learn from it and do something else, don’t try to take shortcuts or you will repeat other errors you did for that same experiments that were eclypsed by the major errors.
If a project was successful, instead, it probably was for a bunch of reasons. It wasn’t just your work and effort, but also the timing and the context of that time. If you decide to invest your time and effort for a new project, try always to push your boundaries instead. It is usually a better choice.
I am actively looking for a new job, while preparing my next step which will be a course on game writing and also a deep study of the Unreal Engine. I am arrived at a point where I consider myself pretty good at free to play, but I am constantly playing indie and AAA games. Why not try do some small indie experiment?
So that I fell in this paradox lately. I see a lot of huge investments and acquisitions towards companies and projects which are basically clones of existing success cases. I see also a bunch of independent people with really good ideas struggling to pay the bills at the end of the month. What the heck is going on? Why those people cannot manage to get investments?
So that the next guess is that maybe they don’t even try to sell something. Every game studio needs something who knows how to sell the idea behind. And suddendly some very old concept, like 3d lowpoly characters in a 3d World becomes the Metaverse. And some people buys that idea.
I work remotely for companies since 2016, more or less. I am very specialized in game economies and UX, so that for them is easy to deal with my tasks and responsibilities.
Game development, instead, is never so easy. You cannot rely just on freelancers to build successful products that potentially may last years. You need a core team fully involved every day. And in order to keep it working properly, you need to set up the proper processes. Also the companies that state that they don’t believe in processes, end up setting up (scrappy) processes in the end. To me, it is better to embrace the process as part of the development. In my opinion, processes are very important.
In 2020 everything shifted online. Remote work was forced by the terrible situation of the pandemic. We had no time to prepare, we had to act fast. In a lot of cases, the same exact process employed before was translated to the asynchronous remote work. Some of the most “boring” things were also eliminated. In their place, nothing new was developed. The new process, then, was like Frankenstein.
Nowadays, many are arguing that we need to return to the office because is not the same online. They are right, online is not the same. But, are you sure you did your job, testing and iterating alternative processes?
First you fail at getting a job in the video games industry.
Then you try to build your own project, but you fail at building a team.
Then you try to make a solo project, but you fail at managing well your time and you never end it.
Then you start teaching online, but no one cares because you have no real experience.
That is when you start considering buzzwords and trends, and join the downward spiral of events with drinks and lamborginis.
But you don’t belong there, and you never will.