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New narrative system for Puzzle-Renovation games

Published by Paolo on 24/10/2022

Puzzle games with renovation mechanic are on top of the charts. They success is tremendous and they are clearly a red ocean market. Many companies try to swim that ocean, so that this week I have decided to make an experiment to celebrate that I got a certification from The Narrative Department.

hooray! I did it! 🙂

The narrative system of Puzzle-Renovation games

The experiment consists of a design iteration to improve the narrative of puzzle-renovation games. I will consider this experiment completed once I have a playable prototype made in Twine featuring the result of this process.

One of the reasons why the Players churn is that they get stuck at some point. The progression curve of levels always goes up, so that with the time the puzzle part gets harder and it’s more difficult to progress through the story.

The issue comes because those games consider a positive outcome the fact of beating a level, but they do not consider all the efforts the Players make at all.

  • At the start of the level, the Player may decide to use a power-up to get help for the level. The first time, the Player will not know how is the layout. Which is why new games warns when there is a hard level.
  • The Player needs lives to start a level. In case they have no lives they should wait or get a lives refill. In order to mitigate this friction, most modern games use lives as an engagement tool. Give the Players infinite lives for X minutes and you will get longer sessions.
  • Puzzle levels are based on a limited number of moves. When they end, the Player can get 2-5 extra moves to beat the level. There is strategy here, in fact the Players study the status of their goals and decide. When the Player is near to the win condition is generally more willing to get extra movements. In order to reach the sweet spot, the number of moves is data driven.
  • During the level the Players may decide to use boosters which are like power-ups but “live”, because they can be got and used on the fly. The Players know the status of the board when they decide to get and use a booster. Boosters add deepness and strategy, they a great driver for monetization.

The Lens of Problem Statement

When the Player completes all the goals, the story continues and the house can be renovated. If we study this flowchart, thou, we can see that the Players can do a lot of things that can be considered positive toward that goal.

They can use a power-up at level start. Get a lives refill. They can get extra moves if they are near the win condition. They can use boosters. All those things are hardly rewarded by the renovation narrative of those games. This is the problem statement for this week:

How can we engage more the Players more interested in the story, rewarding every effort they make to reach better outcomes during the puzzle part?

  • Target: puzzle renovation Players more interested in the story
  • KPI engagement: average session number/day and average duration / session
  • What: create new rewards that help the Players get interesting story outcomes based on puzzle efforts

The game I will use for the exercise is Lily’s Garden, by Tactile Games.

Ask questions during interviews

Published by Paolo on 03/05/2022

A few years ago I found myself in a bar having a coffee with the studio manager of a company that created games for children on smartphones. It was an informal interview process. The interview went somehow well and badly.

Good because this person showed me real numbers and the idea of ​​working on games that reached so many people was stimulating for me. Bad because I did not seem very interested in the development of these games, but just in the economic benefits.

When it came to my time to ask questions, I asked a simple one: How do you rate the quality of the game designers’ work? What makes you say “Paolo, you did a good job”?

The gentleman replied sarcastically: “If I’m drinking champagne from Prada shoes, it means that you did a good job!”

I immediately got up, thanked him for the interview, paid for our coffee and left.

Prepare your questions

Many colleagues find it uncomfortable when we are allowed to ask questions at an interview. I’m not waiting for anything else! Before of the interview, I study in detail everything I can. I go into detail, explore each text on the company’s website and prepare my questions. I have always noticed that it is a key moment.

Especially people at a senior level who are also lucky enough to have a job already, should not forget that an interview is a conversation between two parties. The company is examining us, but we are also examining the company. A great brand is not enough, the news is full of horrible stories about what real life is like in famous and successful companies.

I wish I could write down the questions I always ask, but there aren’t any.

  • First, I carefully study the offer in every single word.
  • Then I study the company’s website in detail.
  • I proceed to look at their titles and the reviews they receive.
  • Finally I study the history of the company on crunchbase and other similar sites to understand how they got where they are.

I find myself with a lot of questions and filter a maximum of three, from which I lead the conversation!

Can Netflix, SONY and Microsoft integrate ad networks in the future?

Published by Paolo on 21/04/2022

Apple and Google have made marketers’ lives more difficult. Today, it is harder for a game to reach the right audience only through ad campaigns on the major networks that offer this service.

Acquiring new players is more expensive and often ad campaings bring people with different motivations to play.

This week’s news is that Netflix is ​​considering introducing ads to its platform. SONY and Microsoft, which are activating their subscription services, are also seriously considering introducing ads to their games.

New ad networks will be created. Someone calls them “content fortresses”. If these companies play their cards right, companies will certainly be pushed to invest in acquisitions directly on these platforms.

The more you know about people’s actions in other products, the easier it is to reach them. The ads that appear to these people will be more meaningful to them. People who enter a game are likely to be more drawn to the core features and mechanics.

Netflix, SONY and Microsoft can score a big win if they play their cards well. As designers, ads are an interesting tool to get better monetization numbers simply improving the reward ratios.

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?

Is data-driven design good for games?

Published by Paolo on 24/02/2022

I work in a analytics centered branch of the gaming business, which is free-to-play. Mobile games constantly collect data on usage. The expression data-driven design is widely used, but I am not sure that is the right way of doing things.

People more expert than me say that there are basically 3 kind of design approaches towards data: data inspired, data informed and data driven.

Image created by The Fountain Institute (link here)

Data-driven design, as defined here is when customer data makes decisions and shows what to design next. In my experience, this always reduces to a basic behavior: follow the biased interpretation of data made by your game lead(s).

Data is intended as information here and not as pure data. To me the best approach is the data-informed one. Players with their behavior should help you improve your game, but you should never forget about your inspiration and intuition. Games are artistic artifacts, at least good games are that.

Most of indie games using data prefer the data-inspired design, but that is very risky because often leads to not set goals properly. In order to set a good goal you should also set up key performance indicators to make periodic sanity checks.

Don’t let just your intuition decide, don’t let just the data. A good game is the perfect balance of both!

Best companies know when it’s time to kill a game

Published by Paolo on 07/02/2022

It is dangerous to scale a game with questionable product/market fit because of The Traction Treadmill. Sometimes players show up in your game, and a small percentage of them retains.

You may think it’s time to scale. Just add players, instead of improving your game. And this works, for a time. You can grow fast just by doubling ad spend. Or tripling ad spend.

You have 10.000 players, you buy 20.000 more.

Then a large percentage of those players go away and never returns back. You have to replace the percentage you lost plus buy more players to grow. You lose a percentage of players fast, and you have the budget and funding to replace them- but then can’t keep grow on top!

You may want to optimize your campaigns and spend less per Player. But inevitably the problem will reappear at some point. Team’s morale will do down as options become scarce. Increase retention becomes too slow and complex.

That is why is extremely important to polish your product but also understand when you cannot fix it. Also the best companies in the world know when to kill projects.

An opportunity for role playing video games and NFTs

Published by Paolo on 25/01/2022

There is something that I have always missed out while playing role playing video games: interpretation.

Producing a story with many branches and possible endings costs too much, then you have to translate it in many languages. That is simply not viable. Reproducing that feeling of “do whatever you want” that is present in tabletop role playing games is hardly achieved by the videogames of today.

You will also need a human (dungeon master) to adapt the scene and the story to the spontaneity of the moment.

What we have

What is possible right now is to provide tools for the people to connect together in a server. Create and explore virtual worlds, also in real time. 

Having a customized avatar that can interact with things and make gestures is also pretty suitable nowadays.

I was just thinking that maybe those new technologies which promise uniqueness and decentralization may grant tabletop role players being rightly represented inside a virtual community.

The journey

You start playing some designed adventure, just to get in touch with the controls and functionalities from a Player standpoint. Then you can look for your first party. 

When you reach a certain status in the community, playing or mastering stories, the game government (developers) recognize your contribution by issuing NFTs.

If you are a player, the more you play, the higher the value of the Character (PC) represented by the NFT. You can sell it and start with new characters. New players may decide to buy a PC and skip the process of getting noticed, for instance. Developers earn a part of every transaction.

If you are a DM the Worlds and Stories you create will become publicly  visible and free for everyone. You may want to pay for the developers to issue you a World-NFT or Story-NFT. Having one of those you can decide to let parties having an entry fee to your adventures, because you got a name in the community. As a dungeon master you should also create and use NPCs. The more you use those, the more your Players will be able to get in touch with them and enrich their background. Developers may decide to issue you an NFT to the highly recognized NPCs inside of the community, encouraging you to create meaningful NPCs.

Your creativity and interpretation, in that way, can be truly compensated!

Saying that NFT-games is the new F2P has lot of flaws

Published by Paolo on 24/01/2022

I lived in first person the success of the free-to-play business model. I remember the times when you could register your bank account to Facebook, purchase credits and use those to buy items inside of a videogame.

That thing was completely different from what is today the NFT-gaming. One of the main goals for the experience of this new kind of game is not pure fun. It is to try to guess where to put your money in order to get the most benefit. It is speculation.

When I read that NFT games are the future I think: maybe the games of the future will also feature this technology, who knows.

When I read “people were skeptic also with f2p”, I say caution. Free-to-play has been born thanks to widely accessed technologies such as social networks and mobile phones without messing with people investing skills. The business was built on facilitating spending for the 5% of people who are willing to. The value proposition was pretty clear: you invest your money, you get the items you want, you get to overcome your pains and you get extra content. This is NOT what NFT is about.

NFT games are hard to access ON PURPOSE and clearly give advantage to wealthier players thanks to a base of poor grinders.

see you soon

Published by Paolo on 11/01/2022

My plan with this blog is to write a post daily. Anyways, life comes first. Now my life gave me a very hard moment to live and face.

I will be out for some time. I will be back writing for you.

The channel to follow if you are into the Metaverse thing

Published by Paolo on 10/01/2022

If you are willing to start the adventure of developing a new Metaverse, you may want to learn from the history of games the good and the bad things happened to the creators and players of MMOs.

I spot this beautiful channel which dedicate each video to a different title. You can see the struggles and the values that a lot of MMOs brought to the industry.

Josh Strife Hayes, check him out and consider support his Patreon!