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Tag: design

Creativity and patience

Published by Paolo on 14/06/2023

For me, there is a direct relationship between creativity and patience. Ideas need to rest before being properly evaluated. Teams need to have the space to make their own journey and thoughts to make a game happen.

Most games never get published. This is due to many factors. But, a good pre-production phase helps mitigate the risk of not seeing the light.

I’ve read many articles explaining how AI tools help speed up the pre-production stage of a game. Some say that companies can also create content faster. I am very skeptical on this point.

In the pre-production phase, a team measures its potential toward a concrete challenge. The AI tools promise to give us concept art of a pretty high standard in minutes. We can also create stories and document templates. We can get quick code snippets.

But then we’ll find ourselves having to edit here and there. This editing process is different from the process that created successful games.

Since when did we decide that faster is better?

A good dish takes time to cook. A good vertical slice or demo, too. People need time to make meaningful connections, the sparks that ignite the engines. If we entrust this process to machines, then we end up working for the machine.

I enter my prompt and await the results. I review and analyze them. I iterate with these results by introducing more prompts. I review everything and make my changes. Instead of me acting and creating, it’s like I’m making corrections to an assistant. And it’s one of the worst assistants because it doesn’t actually think!

Fail faster is good advice, but it doesn’t mean we have to rush things. If something not created by us fails, it will be more difficult to grow. We will have no memory or connections that will make us understand which steps need to improve.

When did we decide that jumbled datasets are better than looking for references?

People need the process of searching for references to achieve creative goals. While the result of a prompt may appear to have excellent quality, it is still a mindless mixing of elements.

Our urge to have “the thing” now causes us to end up feeding a machine that will create something average. It makes us disperse in a mass.

The process that created the hit games that are on everyone’s lips works differently. There are two types of goals, project goals and personal goals. Every maker must have time to reflect. This time is invested in looking for references and organizing them. The same goes for an artist, a writer and a programmer. If this process is skipped in the name of speed, we will be acting like monkeys. Can we make something good? Just by chance.

Is it possible to use these tools in a healthy way?

The quick answer is no because datasets are a sophisticated intellectual property assault.

For the extended answer, imagine that there is no ethical/legal problem. Assume that the datasets are completely legitimate.

These tools can be used to unlock meaningful internal conversations for the team.

If I, a game designer, have to communicate some concepts to artists, these tools can facilitate my work. If a producer is briefing game writers, these tools can help estimate the number of words to use.

AI tools can help us learn to communicate with people belonging to other departments.

There is a direct correlation between the time a team works together and their odds of success. We should foster this necessary time with patience.

  • Instead of thinking about speeding up critical passages, let’s improve cross-department communication.
  • Instead of trying to get to the end faster, let’s improve our understanding of how everything contributes to it.

New Apple Vision PRO

Published by Paolo on 06/06/2023

Apple has shown that they understand that MR devices compete with traditional screens in the physical space.

They haven’t made the same mistake as Meta, of promising virtual worlds where we can meet our friends. The promise is easy to make, very difficult to execute. Also because reality always has more weight than virtual worlds, who cares? They didn’t speak about the metaverse or anything like that. They forged the new term “spatial computing”.

Apple in its typical way of communicating things offers us a simple message. Buy Apple Vision PRO and you will have how, where, and when you want all the screens you want. No more arguing with your wife about where to put the television. You can wash the dishes and have the news of the day ahead of you. You can join a business meeting without having to switch tabs to check your social media.

  • The current price is for early adopters and companies that want to explore the potential of this device, not for the mainstream.
  • I’m not sure if this device can overcome the natural instinct of the human being not to want his face covered.
  • The battery promises a duration of two hours, which seems few to me for use cases.
  • I expect a change of direction in Meta communication for the new Quest 3, now.
  • “Spatial Computing” is still a hard wording for the mass market.

Games with soul

Published by Paolo on 05/06/2023

I’ve been giving From Software games a quick spin lately. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro. Late to the party, I know.

In this age of big announcements of new tools that save time and money, these games are a breath of fresh air for me. The genius of these titles lies in the fact that they have found a system. That design is for a very specific type of audience that buys and plays good games.

I don’t see huge technological feats, they have found a way to reuse graphic assets meaningfully. The studio owns in-house level design patterns that they reuse and adapt to every game. In this way, the development is dramatically simplified.

These games exude pure passion and great design techniques. Good design is not creating super innovative mechanics. It is understanding the players and designing also with costs and time optimization in mind. Is doing that without having to give up human creativity.

I don’t think it’s possible to create games of this type working with a clock in hand to check the time of going home. Inquiring on the net, I found information about the team. Passionate people who work a lot more than normal without bothering to define this as “crunch”.

This type of development is not for everyone, but we can all learn from this. Don’t trust technologies that promise to replace human creativity. With the right process, we ourselves are able to find the best ways to optimize time and costs.

The unpolished trend

Published by Paolo on 02/06/2023

In the last couple of years, my LinkedIn is filled with claims regarding community-driven / community-led games. The search for new business models to give more fresh air to one of the most fresh businesses in the World and attract investments often leads to something unusual.

It seems at first sight like an interesting path to take, because everything is fast. If you are lucky, you may get millions of downloads. This without having to face all the challenges that people that make real games struggle to deal with every day.

Yesterday I was watching a video with the new Supercell game, Floodrush.

I believe that Supercell is trying out the new features from Google. Their new beta program provides lots of tools for building up a community early. Please, look at the game.

Floodrush is an unpolished game, it’s too early to launch it. The goals aren’t exciting, the camera has issues, the controls aren’t intuitive and the portrait doesn’t feel like the right layout for a game based on curiosity and discovery. Supercell has probably fallen into the trap of launching something too early and seeing how it goes. To me, it is not the right strategy.

If something goes more or less well, your competitors will surely catch up with better solutions early. You are revealing the result of your research. If I look at the last Supercell releases it is clear that discovery and exploration are the next thing for them.

Game design is also a form of art

And as artists, we cannot put the audience first. The audience is the most important part of our job, and for that, they deserve something great, something final, something polished. If you try to do what they want you end up doing something average and mediocre.

@glo.io

Rick Rubin shares why artists should put their audience last. #rickrubin #creativity #ideas #creators #creativeinspiration #creativeprocess #interview #motivation #musicproducer #art

♬ original sound – Glo

As game designers, we have lots of tools to spot the weakest parts of our craft and improve them. But we need a clear vision and we need to deliver it in the best quality in order to find success.

Is the next trend just throwing things at people? I have seen this in hyper-casual gaming, I see this in hybrid-casual. I didn’t expect to see this from the masters of free-to-play.

Internal and external storytelling

Published by Paolo on 01/06/2023

Everything tells us a story. Human beings have natural connections that make them very sensitive to narratives.

We create internal ones and receive external ones. The internal ones are personal to each one and depend on a whole series of factors. External ones arrive massively in recent times.

When I was 12 and in my little room playing with my Game Gear, the only external narrative was “orders from above”.

speaking of which, do you remember this game?

Today, when I’m relaxed playing on my smartphone, I’m constantly being stimulated by other narratives. Notifications, messages, calls.

As you can imagine, this impacts the storytelling of the gameplay experience I receive.

Some of my favorite games take 10 seconds to start. They show me the main screen and, while I check the things to do, a series of messages and offers appear. I have to close windows to continue with what I want to do.

In some cases, there is interesting news, no doubt. But everything contributes to creating narratives. It’s not the same as placing a pop-up in front of me or seeing a bird fluttering over the city I’m building and deciding to capture it to discover that it contains a message…

Especially if, at the same time, my wife is reminding me that I have to buy bread and I get an important email from a client.

External narratives are getting complicated and that makes my job more interesting.

Flowcharts and UX flows

Published by Paolo on 30/05/2023

The difference between a flowchart and a UX flow is that the first is drawn from the point of view of the game, while the second is from the point of view of the players.

After writing a brief for a new mechanic or feature, specifying everything in a flowchart helps resolve edge cases. Useful before going on to detail the configurations necessary to unlock the programmers.

After designing UI wireframes, a UX flow helps to find missing pieces. Very useful for going on to detail the graphic assets needed to unlock the artists.

If we don’t have time and we need to be quick, the flowchart is the least essential of the two.

On quality and passion

Published by Paolo on 29/05/2023

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve invested a lot of time listening to industry podcasts. Normally I do it while I’m cooking, before talking to my parents (as a proud Italian I talk to my parents everyday xD).

Listening to the experts, their judgments, and their concerns it seems that there is no point in doing mobile free-to-play if you do not:

– you find ways to have cheap installations

– create a pay-to-win game

– you save a lot on artistic production to ensure a high frequency of new content

Added to all this is the obsession of investors with numbers. If certain numbers don’t add up, it’s not worth investing.

One thing to be clear: I agree in general, even if my artistic side suffers. It’s true that a large part of my job is to ensure a design that allows for flexibility and scalability.

Quality and passion

In my experience, however, I have seen that there are some things that are constant in all games that we could define as quality:

– A game’s startup time is key to its success

– loading times in the game mark the difference in metrics

– game crashes are directly proportional to making people come back more times

– the number of steps needed to get to what you want makes all the difference. It’s not the same to tap PLAY and start playing as it is to tap PLAY and navigate a couple more screens.

Another thing that is not said enough is the importance of having a team that likes the game they are doing. We don’t make games for us, we are professionals and we make them for the players. But we feel clearly when we have a nice product ahead, even if it’s not for us.

It would be great to find a way to convert quality metrics and this sort of sensitivity into numbers on a spreadsheet. But I am afraid is very hard. Maybe it would convince more business people to take the right decisions.

Have a nice week everyone!

Escape from vanity metrics

Published by Paolo on 22/05/2023

I was in a conversation, one of these groups where tons of people are discussing game development. The founder of a local company says he opened his game as a beta. He invited some streamers to let them try the title. These streamers then left a vote. He stated that it was a success, the game had a high rating.

To me, it all led back to a single characteristic of the speaker: vanity. When you have a product in development, you have to challenge your assumptions. Especially if you want this product to be a real success. There’s no point in inviting people, putting them at ease, and asking them if they liked it. Probably some bias you have will be confirmed, some others will not. The more inexperienced part of the team will feel satisfied, the team will be treated well in the next few days. The boss is happy, everyone is happy.

Then comes the weight of reality, law of gravity. They don’t play your game, even for free. You can not recover the investment. You may need to make some staff cuts. You will still declare “yet we tested the game a thousand times and they said it was a good game”.

How to avoid falling into the ego trap?

By asking the right questions. Believing in a product and betting on its success is very positive. However, it must be done with caution.

  • You have to ask specific questions
  • You have to make hypothesis beforehand. These must be quantifiable and real: “Login time to a game is less than 30 seconds,” is a guess. “Love the game” is not a guess.
  • You need to put your designers to observe people playing without interruptions. They must develop the intellectual honesty necessary to create objective reports.
  • Then you have to work first to improve the strong points, then to solve the critical issues.

This is my advice. Escape from vanity metrics.

Gambling games learnings

Published by Paolo on 26/04/2023

Gambling games focus their designs on feedback and effects.

Each time the player presses that button:
– is spending some money
– is hoping to receive an award
– is expecting a show.

The game design of gambling games focuses on
1. visual effects: animations, particles, overlays, …
2. fonts: very important to see the numbers grow with monospace fonts
3. the sounds and lights of the machines.

Obviously, the heart of the game is the statistical system. However, what is learned from gambling applies to various games.

After having worked for some time in gambling, the Italian developer Luca Galante created a game that inherits a lot from the chip-eating machines. He builds a business around that and wins a BAFTA, beating the likes of God of War: Ragnarok. The game is Vampire Survivors, an indie hero with a gambling soul.

SEGA SAMMY HOLDINGS INC. is composed of various business branches. The main one, as far as I know, is pachinko games. A type of gambling game popular in Japan where balls are thrown into the playing space and can hit variable objectives, which can be converted into money thanks to a legislative vacuum.

Curiously, they recently acquired Rovio Entertainment Corporation, whose main service is a series of games where you shoot rounded birds with a slingshot aiming to hit goals and score points…

(I know it has nothing to do with the rational point of view of the business. But flying balls can be better understood by those dedicated to producing ball-launching machines, right?)

You learn a lot from gambling!

Mailing list on User Acquisition

Published by Paolo on 26/04/2023

In these times of automation and cost-cutting, one of the most important things for me is to develop my own special sauce.

That thing that no one can imitate, characterizes and distinguishes me. My secret to bringing value to the clients I work for. Truly quantifiable value.

The best game design book in the world (The Art of Game Design by Jesse Shell, of course) starts with a great lesson on inspiration: Look everywhere else.

In the story there is a gathering of conjurers, one catches the attention of the protagonist who asks him how he can be so original. The magician explains that he tries to look outside his own world and import things from other contexts.

It’s a way of making your own special sauce. I’ve been following this suggestion for years. One of the places I look as a game designer is marketing, specifically the world of UA.

Matej with his content helps me to have better ingredients to put into my special sauce. You should read it too!