Do you believe in your project or not?
Someday the game you are making is exciting.
Some other day you feel like nothing works. It’s the worst game ever.
This is completely normal and common. Track these days. Play the build, every single day. And speak with your team. Do you believe you are on the right track?
If you are not sure about that from many milestones, it’s time to question harder topics.
Game design takes concepts from broader design also. One of the most important books, “The Design of Everyday Things” (Don Norman), set the base for UX design today.
One concept is that form follows function. When you, as a designer, must decide which form something in your game should have, it’s better to think about its function first. Many games adopt things like this. You can see that a power-up that makes things explode is a bomb, while a water engine in the last Zelda game looks like a hydrant.
But is it always the case? Every game has aesthetics that combine with the fantasy it offers and the motivations it gives to the Players. It’s clear that the casual Player of Candy Crush Saga is looking for immediacy, but the Player of a From Software game may be looking for something more complicated to use, in the name of the “beauty” of it.
Form follows function but it is always guided by the aesthetics!
Yesterday I was thinking about my personal projects. I never closed one in my entire life. Why am I procrastinating so much? Some of them are still interesting to me. Yet, I cannot manage to finish them. That is a problem I want to solve, take this as my first New Year resolution.
Probably one of the problems is my perfectionism. I started these projects from the simple concept of Ikigai. Ikigai means “the pleasure you have in doing things every day”. But then my perfectionism kicked in and somehow I got burnt. For some projects I had also some other people involved, waiting for me to close them. What a shame!
Well, I announce today that this has to change now. Less perfectionism and more acceptance of my limits are the way I intend to take.
Loops are a great way to drive design discussions with everyone on the team. They are a simplified version of a flowchart and the last element connects to the first. I see that there are different definitions of loops and today I want to show you mine.
As with many other definitions related to game design, the fact that there are different versions implies often that you need to make an effort to understand the point of view of who’s driving the conversation.
When I say game loops, I mean the sequence of most used features within the game.
With core loops I mean the sequence of actions that the Player performs more often during the gameplay
Finally, there are the metagame (or economy) loops, which represent the construction of the economy on top of the actions. A good economy makes you think about the game when you are not playing.
There is not a single way of looking at loops, what is important as a designer is to have your voice. Oftentimes clients show me their “core loops” and in my definition, those are “game loops” instead. And there is no problem, the client is always right and I can adopt their jargon easily. The important is to keep my base strong to drive meaningful discussions.
Loops are useful to express concepts and drive discussions, they don’t have to be perfect. They are a medium for a concrete purpose: clarity. I saw very complicated loops, for instance, that do not add clarity. In that case is better to break it down into different feature loops (which are game loops that describe a single feature, when it’s too big).
Finally, the loops should be meaningful. Good loops have a long-term goal associated with them. You decide to repeat the loop over and over to reach that goal. So ask yourself what is the goal for every loop you identify.
“Someday a generative AI will be able to create a release a complete videogame. Can you imagine that?“
Yes, I can. But I am very skeptical about the quality, the value, and the timeline for that.
The creative process is very uncertain and risky. Specifically, you could work for months on something and then earn nothing. Many non-creative people would like to mitigate that risk. I get that for the true capitalist that’s juicy.
Now, think about yourself as a Player. You are downloading a fantastic new game that you purchased. And you know that a machine made the whole game. As a Player, you know you have to beat some useless obstacle not created by a team of people. You don’t have a true mind challenging you and presenting an opera. A machine did that and a company is asking to pay for it.
Can something like that be appealing to the people?
As a developer think about passing your days writing prompts and editing the results. Or better, remove the editing part. You have an idea and TA DA! Compile a superb game. A game you feel you couldn’t even imagine. And you didn’t have to pitch, discuss, get approvals. You didn’t have to struggle to find the right art style, the good coding structure, the best mechanics. You have it all in a few minutes.
Now think about it: how would you feel if you have to sacrifice one of the most important parts of being a person for speed, success, and revenue?
At the present time, I feel that there will be a split in game developers in case of the realization of this crazy prediction.
A tool without a good mind can become a piece of garbage, an obstacle, a weapon, and many other things. The problem is never the tool, but the fact that not any tool is useful to everyone.
That’s why I tend to stay suspicious when I see best practices. That is why I don’t use any tool without making it mine, somehow.
If you give me a space rocket, which can be seen as a space travel tool, I will probably sell it. Or make a mess, I don’t know. The problem is that I am not prepared to use that tool. It’s amazing, but just not for me.
I see a dangerous trend on social networks like LinkedIn. It is proven that strong opinions spread better with the algorithm. People tend to make declarations like brainstorming are useless. Roadmaps are killing your product. Design documents are a waste of time.
All of those things are just tools. Great games have been created by using those tools at certain points. It’s a matter of mindset, not tools.
Returning to our example, best practices are great for unlocking meaningful discussions. But most of the time, they are bad to just speed up the process. We can say that the no.1 best practice is that you need time to make things simpler and better.
(The post was inspired by the last podcast from Seth Godin and a bunch of other things)
I live in Barcelona, but I was born in Naples the city where the pizza was born. Every time I travel I see famous pizza chains spread all across the World. Probably everyone with my background finds that pizza awful.
How is it even possible that people eat something like that?
But that pizza sells, and volumes are probably higher than the pizza places I know. The ones that make me dream of coming back to my hometown. Professional “pizzaioli” from Naples make the better pizza, at least in my opinion. But they earn less than entrepreneurs who probably never put a foot in one of their franchises.
Is that even fair?
It is what it is. There is a convenient way of making a pizza, that is looking for big volumes to make a profit. But the final product is worse for the connoisseur.
Then there is the inconvenient way of doing pizza, the one that makes people dream. You cannot reach high volumes without ruining the experience. You need simple ingredients. People need to eat at the moment. You have to be patient. But your legacy will last.
The inconvenient way leads the way to the convenient one. Once you find the right formula, you can decide to go for more volume. The pizza entrepreneur, instead, will have a hard time figuring out how to start an inconvenient pizza place. When you start from convenience you miss important steps.
The best preproduction of new games is exactly like the inconvenient pizza place. You need to understand well the market by serving a small niche first. You need innovation coming out from a true personal thing. You need to lead with uncertainty. You have to be patient, using simple game design ingredients. And this is hard, especially for big companies. That’s where I help my clients find new ideas in a professional “pizzaiolo” way.
Over the last 10 years, I have assisted in the rise of many services and information providers that offer concrete predictions based on data. I had to quit a big company too, because of that. They were also testing game concepts based on the people’s responses to some text. So everything we proposed was texted out using a text redacted by someone with a high salary and very few things to do.
I went to a local indie fair where a friend pitched a game to publishers. One of them said, “Don’t you know that games with vegetables do not work?”. Then we ask why the publisher’s business model doesn’t work. It’s because of things like that!
Games are made by people who believe in a concrete vision and work hard to deliver. Many games will fail, because maybe people are not interested, because of the quality or many other factors. But you cannot use data to predict the success/failure of something without having tested it out.
Data-driven (or better, data-informed) development works when you work with concrete data from your things and compare them with your past. It doesn’t work when you read data from others and try to replicate it blindly. Sometimes it works out, but it’s because of other factors. It’s always because there is a passionate team behind that did something great. And lots of luck, the state of the market, and factors you can never control.
You can avoid risks by going iterative, of course. You can test prototypes and demos and see the actual reaction of people to that. That is good. But you cannot assume “this kind of game with these features is working in the market, so if we made something like this we would probably have success”.
When we play games for work we often misunderstand the real motivations for the true fans to play that game.
Maybe we are working on a social casino game but we don’t really like this kind of games, as players. So that we study that game from a cold perspective. And we can also think that it would be easy to replicate mechanics and dynamics. Social casino games have really simple interactions, right?
Then the degeneration of that discourse leads to something worse. We start believe that a machine can build this in series. Today everyone is talking about AI, but also before of that there were kinds of fun experiments.
But then we notice that these kind of experiences are hardly successful out there. Best social casino games have teams of more than 50 people working hard and passionately every day to deliver the best experience.
To me there is a silent contract between the Player and the Designer. For designer I mean the whole team, also. That silent contract states that there is a creator from one side that propose a challenge to another person on the other side. The motivation to play (or fun, if you prefer) comes mainly from this contract.
You decide to play a game. You know that the game has been made by someone. Part of the challenge is to beat that someone’s mind. If you read reviews of games you will notice that many comments go in the directions of creators.
What happens if the Player know that a machine created that game? Will they give these games the same value? People are smarter (and dumber) than we think.
To me all the design disciplines (systems, gameplay, UX, level, narrative) have two facets. One is the vision and the other the content.
The vision is always what interests me the most. I believe that games are a synthesis of certain fantasies. They have their structure in terms of mechanics, gameplay, win/lose conditions, and so on. But this structure serves the purpose of delivering a vision.
The content is fun to produce. Creating levels or scripts puts me in a flow state, I can spend hours without even noticing it. Especially certain tools make everything so much fun. The content serves the vision above and should be always checked under that lens.
I think that the work I do is juggling with these concepts every day, every week, every month.