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Tag: design

I believe in game education

Published by Paolo on 20/01/2025

A question that I receive a lot is: “do I need to study game development at a University, if I want to become a game developer?”

And my answer is: no, you don’t need to.

Often, there is a follow up question: “do you believe in game education?”

And my answer is: yes, I do.

It may look contradictory, but there is a sense in it. Nowadays, the access to the information useful to get the right education is very wide. Speaking of game development, you can choose to educate in game development:

  1. because it’s a beautiful craft. You will grow as a person like when you study music, literature, math, and other fields
  2. it’s good to understand how something so pervasive as games work to live better
  3. having teachers explaining us the art of game design and development makes us connect with our inner kid.

Those are just three reasons, but there are many more.

What to do when you don’t know what to do?

Published by Paolo on 17/01/2025

Often it happens that your team is developing what you have defined in your design documentation. It happens that you don’t know specifically what to do next.

I use these moments to play competitor games and engage with their audience. I join Discord servers, lurk subreddits, and so on. I try to keep myself in the shoes of a Player of my references.

The second thing I do is to play the last build or the last code version intensively. As a game designer you need to be aware of what game is coming out.

I also keep ordered single big documents containing everything that has been already defined and implemented in the game. It is very useful to keep track of the vision and its progress.

State of Videogames 2025

Published by Paolo on 15/01/2025

As every year, Mr. Matthew Ball dropped a set of slides containing his takes on the state of the games industry. You can read it here in multiple formats.

To me it’s interesting to read these documents mainly to understand the mentality of business people. But those charts and sentences are fundamentally biased towards the macro. The rational side of the business of making games, the statistics. They ignore most of the other part, which exists and it’s equally important. The intuitive side of games, the art. The “we make this game because we believe that we need to say these things”. That is also what makes games so great.

Also, I do not agree with his call for growth. He says that videogames overgrew the countries GDP and then he says that the industry should grow further? I don’t think so. The industry should become more realist, instead.

Walking the walk

Published by Paolo on 14/01/2025

I haven’t played Indiana Jones for a while and now I feel that I don’t know where I was, anymore. Probably I will quit this game without completing, which is sad because I like it a lot.

As far as I know, very few people complete single player games. You put lots of effort in making a complete experience and only a minority of the few people in the World that played it enjoy it fully. It’s part of the deal with creativity.

Another deal is that a project can fail, no matter if you have enough experience to run it or not. You can be a true expert and still make something that people don’t want. The other day I was watching a live playtesting of an MMO game made by ex-BigCorporate people with no funds. They were asking to support their patreon and stuff like that.

I thought: “guys, are you crazy or something? Put yourselves in this hard project with no money”.

But everyone has a story, they live their and I live mine right?

Design works on forms

Published by Paolo on 09/01/2025

In a perfect world with perfect projects made by perfect people, you make a game only when the vision is defined. In that perfect world, building the game means executing the vision.

We live in the normal World, though, and you see rarely a vision defined at project start. As a designer you encounter a direction that is try to understand what to do.

The best way to serve them and the rest of the team is to make concrete choices and execute them.

While directors are looking at the landscape from over the clouds, designers work on the ground. Game design is making concrete choices on a game, no matter what. From the top they say “yeah, sure, let’s try this but then let’s try that“, and it’s fine (well, it’s not fine, but it happens). What we can do is to execute (if we are allowed to). We should find the “this” to execute and go for it.

I have seen the prototyping as a tool for procrastination. To give something to do to the team while the direction can get that eureka moment. That often brings the teams to a bad track. Many potentially good games weren’t successful because of that.

Prototyping is a tool to find the form. But it can be one of the slowest and more expensive ways of finding the substance. It’s hard to build a vision through a set of prototypes.

Researching and engaging with competitors are the best way to understand the substance. Plus, a lot of patience.

The most important resolution

Published by Paolo on 02/01/2025

In this fight for taking back our attention, I started unsubscribing from newsletter and YouTube channels. I don’t have specific resolutions for the new year, apart from those who are always in my life. But I got to a level where I don’t tolerate anymore all this information that I constantly have access to. Maybe is better knowing less, but deeply.

This thing is valid for everything, from professional life to the rest of it. I need to get my attention back from infinite scrolling feeds and silly games if I want to really build a good game. I need to focus on other things of my life, too. So that I will probably stop looking at curves and statistics. I will not listen to industry experts building their stories to sell their brand. Not that I don’t like them, please do not misunderstand. I love that thing!

But I feel overwhelmed by too many sources, images, sounds, slangs. It’s just too much to leave into my mind the necessary space to build my things up. It will probably hurt for a while, but I have too. My mind and also my body are begging me this.

Someone said “no” to LotR

Published by Paolo on 31/12/2024

The biggest Italian books publisher rejected The Lord of The Rings, many years ago. The first reaction I had when I saw this post the other day was from my belly.


But I had the time to reflect: to me, LotR is a masterpiece, but it has also a strong “personality”. It’s not an average story; you may like it or not for specific reasons.

Imagine to be the person in charge of selecting the best books. Something like this arrives, you read it and you like it. But its personality is very strong, and your role requires you to be cold and professional.

Today I can read these words and think that the decision maker made a mistake. But then I put myself in their shoes and it’s hard to make a decision with something like Tolkien’s book. A modern Tolkien can write tales in smaller formats on platforms like Substack. With nobody predicting if the text could be right for a specific geography.

It happens also with video games, I have to say especially to us game designers. Part of our responsibility is to pitch new ideas for features and mechanics. All companies have people in charge that filter our proposals. This process filters also good things out, it’s part of the game.

To design and produce you often need a sort of authorization from people in charge. These people, like you, make mistakes. The lesson you take can be that this is unacceptable, but often it’s a matter of communication. If something so special like The Lord of The Rings arrives on your desk, you can make errors. That’s why people that get a proposal should be prepared first.

I don’t know the full story, maybe the Tolkien’s agent just sent the book with a note. When you present something, the receivers should know all that from before. In that way, they will feel already connected and familiar to the thing.

Like new writers on Substack, leave crumbs and taste the environment!

Can I be more productive with AI?

Published by Paolo on 31/12/2024

I own my way of doing things. With time, I got to believe in the power of patience for creative work. Ideas have to rest, somehow. Decisions must have taken at their own pace. Often, you take many micro-decisions in a couple of hours. Other times you need a week, or two, to get that “eureka” moment.

If you leave this part to anyone, or anything, you are missing the chance of connect things yourself. If you skip the writing of a huge, complete GDD with all your notes, you risk to get lost along the way.

You need to be a strategic thinker, and for that you need to have very clear the system.

“so, it’s a no?”

It’s a “it depends”. I started using Claude AI only on my personal project, the indie action sandbox Pawtners Case. I am developing it outsourcing Unreal Engine development, Art and first level design. And I am doing this in my way, I have no boss, no publisher, nobody supporting economically the project apart from me.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a project proposal that I still have to share with the team. Big docs are not meant to be shared with programmers and “hey, have a read”. Nobody will, it doesn’t matter if you’re a great entertainer or a poor writer. Still, they are very important for ourselves!

(with “big” I mean “more than 5 pages”)

Now that I got a couple of features and prototypes ready, I feel the need to share it. That is because now I see that they are involved. They need to know more. Before they were just following the lead of their client. Now they are part of this, for real.

So I asked Claude AI to review my document and find me possible areas that could need more detail. And I have to say that I am pretty happy with the result. The software is aware to be a software and it provided me a concise list of things. Many of them are not meant to be in a game proposal to me, so I discarded them. There are two of twenty points, though, that made me thing of small edits here and there.

I could have hired a freelancer to make the same work, but it’s hard to find the right person. I can clearly see the value here. Maybe those 2 points would have been reasons of discussions with the team. And that is valuable too.

I did the job first, and this software helped me with its editing. I am in control of the thing, I am not spinning a wheel and see what it spits out. I am the person in charge all the time. I see value in that.

The most important story

Published by Paolo on 31/12/2024

These days for work reasons I am playing a bunch of simulation games (sims) of different nature. I am making in my spare time a sandbox simulator of a police dog, and then for other reasons I am playing other sims.

They all have a single thing in common, despite belonging to different genres. In fact, immersive sims come from first person shooters, a specific type of action game. Colony sims come from strategy games. Sandbox sims come from adventure games.

They all share a single reason of why Players do love them: they foster the player agency, letting them create their own story.

Everytime I join one of their Discord for research I feel that. Every player has a different story to tell. That is, in my opinion, the single most important motivation for the core audience of sim games. Simulation doesn’t mean simulator, high realism and fidelity (also if some simulation game puts “simulator” in its name).

It means to have many levers to move to create your own story for your friends, Discord, or a livestream.

Continuous patrolling in Pawtners Case

Published by Paolo on 13/12/2024

Yesterday, I got the third prototype for my game Pawtners Case. I have this design pillar, which is called “continuous patrol”. One of the objectives of the ideation stage and pre-production is to decide on design pillars that will guide the rest of the production and launch.

That means that I don’t want to have a main menu. You run the game, you are in the game. Most games do not need a main menu, especially nowadays when loading a game takes so much times and connections.

Also, there is no death condition. You can fall off the level (imagine levels are islands in the sky) and land on the same level again. I am also thinking of minigames to do.

Credits will be integrated into the game, too. You can ignore them, but you don’t have to skip them.