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Tag: design

Reworks and crossroads

Published by Paolo on 17/03/2025

Hey reader, thank you for being here today too. It’s been a while, I lost an important source of income and rearranged my forces these days. My game Pawtners Case is moving forward but slowly. Briefly speaking

  • I have pitched to a potential investor. They want to see a demo.
  • I sent the pitch to industry friends (if you’re one of them, thank you very much for your feedback again!) and spotted my potential weaknesses
  • I am rearrarging forces and trying to differentiate my business. In fact I cannot rely only on Pawtners Case to stay afloat. I need to find a source of income and also new projects.
  • I am also retaking my programming side, hope to show you something soon.

Good news I am here, healthy and alive. I have my challenges as you do have others for sure, but I am happy! The important thing at crossroards it’s to make a step forward for our rework.

What I learned in the Playable Stories Workshop

Published by Paolo on 03/03/2025

Yesterday, I participated in a workshop on how to write for playable stories. It was a workshop oriented to professional game writers, and I am not. Still, I found it very useful in improving my skills in narrative design.

It was divided into 3 sessions, with pauses in the middle. Session one was about how games change stories. Session two was about how to make stories playable. The last one was about how to use the storytelling toolbox. The tools all writers have and also the tools that belong only to game writers.

The workshop was packed with practical insight and exercises to train for the next days. In Fall 2022, a company I worked for paid for my fee at the narrative department workshop. This gave me access to a series of interesting workshops at a special price. I am thankful for that.

On technical skills

Published by Paolo on 25/02/2025

Let’s talk about technical skills. I read a question around often and sometimes some students ask me: what skills should I have?

The question comes most of the time from our innate desire to fit (gregariousness, submission). There is a job market and we want to get in. This is fair.

As far as I’m concerned, the answer is like learning a new language. If there is no valid reason behind it, we will make a lot of effort to learn it. I learned English to better understand songs and video game stories. I learned Spanish to be able to live where I live. I learned Portuguese because of the culture and history behind Capoeira. I did learn because I felt would improve me as a person.

Likewise, the technical skills I decided to cultivate for game design come from there. Spreadsheets because I have always liked math and put things in order. The most common engines, especially for level design, because it puts me in a state of flow like when I play a video game. Game writing because, as you can see, I love writing. UX/UI because I don’t know how to draw, but I still like to arrange things visually as a form to clarify my ideas.

The question for me is not “which skills should I learn?”, but “which are the technical skills that can help me find my voice and let it come out?”

The main challenge of a professional game designer

Published by Paolo on 24/02/2025

It’s one thing to design a game (or a feature of a game) and another to sell it. This is perhaps the hardest lesson to learn during the career of a game designer.

It’s not just about thinking about systems, mechanics, development context. It’s also about convincing someone to go ahead.

  • If you have the funds, this someone can be a potential player. You have to convince them to play.
  • If you don’t have the funds, but you have a great idea, this someone can be a publisher or an investor.
  • If you work for someone, you have to convince them!

The key point is always in the expectations that one has about something.

  • “I will buy this game for 30 euros because I think I will have a fun time”
  • “I have to invest in this project because I see great possibilities of return”
  • “I approve this design because I think it is the right one for our game”

The biggest challenge is that creatives think on a different level than others.

I’ll give a concrete example with my game Pawtners Case. Lately I’ve been proposing it to try to finance it. It is perceived as a game that is too cheap, and so with little potential. It doesn’t matter that I propose something workable and scalable. Publishers prefer to focus more on something unachievable rather than go step-by-step.

Systems in symphony

Published by Paolo on 20/02/2025

A game is a form of entertainment. Entertainment is fun. Fun is survival. Even though you don’t need to hunt anymore, you still have this kind of instinct that you feel you’d like to improve. A video game allows you to train it without risk. Other forms of entertainment are not interactive, so you aren’t training. But still, you are learning.

When I design a game, the first question is this: For which instincts do I want to prepare a journey to train them? Creating video games means creating fictitious problems. Very often we confuse game design with general design: solving problems for people. Game design solves the need for entertainment but creates problems to do that!

Once the instincts are clear, a series of systems can form the path to their training. It’s like composing a piece of music, you have all the instrumental lines and have to make them act in a symphony.

There has been a lot of talk about “game economies” that pervaded discussions on systems design, but I think of “game symphonies”. Also because certain games do have an economy. Game economists think about the distribution and conversion of virtual resources. Which is vital for certain services to be profitable.

Game designers, instead, are more centered on rhythm, melody, and harmony of systems.

Try Railgods of Hysterra DEMO

Published by Paolo on 15/02/2025

I have had the chance to work on indie games for a year and a half. Many years of working in free-to-play have given me the knowledge, especially in system design, applicable to games with crafting, building, and character growth. I also had the chance to apply techniques I learned by taking narrative design and game writing courses.

The nice thing about indie is that the work is based on solving design problems while remaining consistent with a narrative and gameplay structure. You don’t hear KPIs mentioned, which makes your days more enjoyable.

Another positive thing is that you meet teams that are committed to the game. Generally, you don’t do experiments and you don’t cancel games for not having reached certain numerical results. Games are published, and they can be successful or not. So as a designer, it’s nice to see something that is also yours get published.

One of the games I helped is Railgods of Hysterra. V-Rising meets H.P. Lovecraft. Made with Unreal Engine. You can feed and grow your demonic train and travel the cursed world of Hysterra. I worked for 3 months (usually a client stays with me this time), and I helped with some systems that you can see in the video on my LinkedIn.

The game has a demo available on Steam for FREE, try it! Leave a review, helps out a ton.

A good use case for Claude.ai

Published by Paolo on 13/02/2025

I just paid for the premium subscription to Claude AI. Writing certain design documents took me 3-4 days. With Claude, 1-2.

Like every AI, it freaks out a lot. But this help me get started on tasks. I tell it to write me certain spec, it writes me something full of errors and that helps me think. It’s like teaching to a dumb student.

Then, when I have my document with wireframes, I pass it to it and first I tell it to act as a programmer. Again, it hallucinates but it helps me understand the “edge cases” the empty cases that I hadn’t thought of.

Finally, after a second iteration on the document, I send it again and ask to act as a quality assurance professional, to generate a test plan for me. This helps me think carefully about closing all the loose ends.

This is valuable. Indeed.

Stories come from consciousness

Published by Paolo on 12/02/2025

A guy that I follow on LinkedIn said: “TikTok is already testing TV-like series with 90-second episodes, some titles generating hundreds of thousands of views behind modest paywalls ($5.13 for 10 episodes). Instagram creators are building millions of followers through episodic Reels, while YouTube embraces serialized content on YouTube TV.”

I understand the interest that an AI-generated story can generate.

“hey look at what this new technology is capable of doing!”

In this sense, I understand why there is so much engagement. There is something new and people want to see what it is. There is a long way to go from here to thinking this is the future. The “future” arrives organically, and it is difficult to predict. I work every single day with creativity and storytelling. Like everyone else, I am using tools that promise greater productivity. I am noticing improvements, especially in “unlocking” my mind in certain tasks.

Example: new task, with a poorly defined problem. I send a prompt to Claude, who gives me a wrong and summary answer. I start mentally criticizing the answer, and this makes me think on the right track.

But there is a long way to go from here to thinking that I can create stories that keep people engaged for a long time. These stories come from consciousness. Consciousness is impossible to reproduce in electrical signals because it does not come from there. It comes from something above us.

But that’s my belief.

Playtest what’s wrong to find solutions

Published by Paolo on 11/02/2025

A good way to learn more about your game is to keep something that you see as problematic and playtest it. You will discover the obvious, that you need to fix it. But you will also understand much more things behind that.

It happened to me last week, I had the opportunity of running a playtest for my game. And for it I decided to create a specific control system. The developers said “we don’t feel it right”, and me neither.

At the playtest, everyone told me that the system was unconfortable. But I had to see their struggle to decide to take action in first place. In fact, I could notice how they handled the things and that helped me find the solution.

Creating engagement versus finding motivations

Published by Paolo on 10/02/2025

When you work for others, very often you are assigned to a project led by a marketing person. Most of the time, you are asked to find formulas to create engagement, addiction, or worse.

However, game design is not this. I don’t know how to define this role of engagement-creator, but it is certainly not game design. It is a magician, perhaps. Or manipulator.

When people say that a game is fun, it is because that game has characteristics that make it enjoyable. But you as a designer do not have a crystal ball, you cannot decide that your game will be fun.

What you can do with your work is find the things that motivate players to play more or complete the game (or parts of it) and enhance them.

Game design is not the creation of the magic flute capable of trapping mice and taking them where you want. Game design is finding the treasure of the duende and digging to bring it to light.