Skip to content

Tag: design

Lack of dedication makes sketchy games fail

Published by Paolo on 06/02/2023

I helped a company develop hyper-casual games for over a year.

From a pure game design perspective, hyper-casual games have been a breath of fresh air for mobile gaming. Some publishers have started publishing outlandish ideas in an environment full of best practices and mechanics that are too similar to each other. There was a serious opportunity to make great leaps forward in mechanics.

However, the hyper-casual game development process requires investing very little in uncertainties. What has been missing for me is dedication. Build a game in a week, feed the algorithm, CPI too high, out. Make another game. This type of process conflicts with the initial vision.

We can blame Apple for being so unthrifty with its business partners. And we will be right. But we must also look at the beam in our eyes. Games must be made extremely well, this is a refined craft. Players deserve well-crafted experiences, not a series of sketchy ideas. You need to offer a fantasy, a vision and care about every detail. Impossible to do that in a week.

Read the bold statement here.

Design concrete experiences

Published by Paolo on 03/02/2023

The main problem with the vague concept of Metaverse is that it is an experience without a central point. This year I saw the presentation of many metaverses online. All promise exploration in a three-dimensional virtual world with personalized avatars.

While exploring, you can generally meet and interact with other people. Specific content can be accessed, depending on the metaverse. Sometimes it’s about listening to music. In some other cases, you can visit museums.

And so what?

There are no reasons enough to involve people. A video game has goals, obstacles, rewards, and so on. Generally, a video game also offers the elements of a metaverse but in higher quality. These elements are created around a concrete gameplay experience, not around “whatever”.

This also allowed people to meet and ignore the rules of the game. See the case of GTA and Fortnite. When a video game is successful can also become a meeting point for people. A platform through which a brand can choose to invest in the promotion of its products.

The same argument doesn’t work the other way around. It is absurd to think that people install and frequent a virtual space without any purpose. It is necessary to think about which concrete experience to offer the player.

In 10 years maybe it will be possible to switch from one game to another without too much waiting and navigating the menus. This would be a step forward that would make life easier for hardcore gamers. But the change is always due to a desire to face a certain type of challenge and live a concrete experience.

Sometimes it seems that the dream of some marketers is to trap people in a space where they can be bombarded with advertising. This doesn’t work and never will. The human being has its limits but is capable of recognizing easy tricks. Especially nowadays where everything is connected and opinions spin and influence people.

Game designers in 2023

Published by Paolo on 02/02/2023

The Deconstructor of Fun team has written predictions for 2023. I would like to give advice to game designers who will be working on the new challenges the year promises.

#1 Organic Discovery Will Be Deceased

Working for mobile games means working with two gatekeepers who are constantly changing the tables. This brings various headaches and also affects the work of us game designers.

There are always winners, and if we look at the rankings over time we see that Google and Apple reward the oldest successful games. Many try to take away their primacy, but it is difficult since they are the favorites.

The article says:

The end of discovery also means that there will be no indie breakouts from small indie developers. Instead, the indie developers will have three options. 

  1. Sell their game to a safe harbor, such as Apple Arcade, Netflix, or similar. 
  2. Join one of the few powerful game companies taking over mobile.
  3. Exit mobile. 

On this point, I have to say that they have risked quite a bit. In our industry, there are always surprises. Some indie with a vision could make a game that would be played en masse by streamers and become a phenomenon. We wouldn’t see it coming.

I never believed in the k-factor, that wasn’t science. It was pseudoscience to sell ideas internally.

Focus on games that are appealing to streamers (maybe to play together with others).

Think about releasing a PC Steam and console version as well.

For me, the present of video gaming is this. There is gaming and there are various forms of accessing it. I think this is not the only way, but it would make life a lot easier for an independent team. Although it takes investment to publish on various platforms, so it’s good to keep it simple.

#2 Publishers Push to Off-Platform Payments

From what I read, there will soon be various alternative forms of payment. This requires us game designers to contribute to the gamification of payment systems. Let’s start documenting how flows are handled by games that use off-platform payments. Gaming experiences will become a bit more complicated, so it is good to think in reward the efforts.

#3 Paid UA Becomes a Break-Even Game

This is something we have little control over. Recently we are seeing the end of the hyper-casual business. It was a market where the same players passed from one game to another at a low cost. The joke no longer works of course.

I am still convinced of the design principles behind simple games. Players have always liked simple games. In the beginning, it was arcades, today it is hyper-casual. It is always good to think in simplicity, immediacy and snackability.

#4 The Safe Harbors Get Embraced

On this point there is little to add, it seems crystal clear to me. It is good to own and study these platforms if you work on these kinds of games. Our bosses will probably do business with them at some point! As mentioned earlier, gaming streamers also play a key role here. If some Netflix game manages to attract the attention of some major TikToker, it’s obvious that there will be great returns!

#5 Streaming Platforms Move into Mobile Games – for Now…

It is clear that there is a fever for these platforms to find the next blockbuster game. This means more work for us, which is good. These platforms will have their own clear ideas on what to do, based on their experts and analysts. As a designer, my advice is to facilitate things and not hinder them. We are the facilitators of the act of game design in a team. Our efforts should be directed at realizing the visions that come from above. And this we know is very hard, it’s a huge exercise in patience for some of us. My advice? Focus on the beauty of design as a craft, not on power points and OKRs.

#6 Venture Capitalists Will Face a Reckoning

I am seeing this first-hand with a client. VCs are at a stage where they are basically not doing VCs anymore. In this moment in history VCs already want to see results before they bet on a team. We must focus on designing the shortest path to concrete numbers to achieve. At this moment in history we cannot afford to explore all possibilities. We need to make decisions incrementally on other designs that already work. For some of us, this is difficult. My advice is to find a sideline activity where we can vent our pure creativity. For example, I play music and capoeira on my spare time.

#7 You Will Get Back to the Office – Fully Remote Becomes an Anomaly

I’m not sure I agree with this, in any case the DoF guys are more experienced so I assume they are right. It is much better to solve some issue in person. And it’s easier to build new teams with presence, honestly. This 2023 I wish you more face-to-face and fewer Slack notifications!

Plans for 2023: Simple and well made games

Published by Paolo on 01/02/2023

I had time to think about my future. And yet I have not come to any conclusion!

Being a consultant is great but very stressful. Being employed is less stressful, but also less beautiful. My career has been oriented towards free-to-play mobile. New frontiers of video games are being opened. AAA game companies are taking an interest in data oriented game designers. AAA are the games that interest me the most as a player.

Many experts are pointing out the challenges of free-to-play to find new players. Free-to-play is based on the frantic pursuit of whale players. People capable of spending large amounts of money in order to have more power in the game. These people however join games that are very successful among free players. That would be the players who play without spending a cent and that consist of more than 90% of Players. Quick math, you need a LOT of people playing your game. And those people is not cheap to get.

The result is that there are a number of best practices that make free-to-play mobile games all the same, by genre. Open any puzzle game and it will probably have the same characteristics as the others. People are tired of seeing the same thing over and over again.

The hyper-casual trend is dying because its business model is no longer sustainable. Apple took countermeasures against Facebook and destroyed the UA strategies of those games. However, the development process that requires a quality video game has become redundant.

While on the one hand they offered original ideas, on the other they didn’t devote the necessary efforts to create unique experiences. The important thing was to fit into the equations on CPI and D1 retention and that’s it. The vision, the underlying fantasy, the actions, the objectives and the economies were literally sketched out. For me, that was the real reason why the system didn’t work. It’s obvious that people like to see new games that are fun and easy to use. But it’s also obvious that people want to have well-made games!

I hope this 2023 to contribute to this point: create simple but well made games!

End of the year, end of the World

Published by Paolo on 20/12/2022

As we approach the end of the year, clients always become more demanding. I am afraid that I will have no time to post for a while since we have important deadlines to reach.

This post is to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

From February I will have two days a week that I can dedicate to some new clients.

My specialty is mobile f2p, but I’m definitely a very versatile game designer. If you need to transform your creative vision into a successful game, don’t hesitate and contact me! System, level, narrative, and UX/gameplay design. One person, multiple skills!

(The tariff is the right one to balance the loop described in the diagram below)

Start from Personas

Published by Paolo on 19/12/2022

When you study game design, you usually focus on documents and prototypes for small games. The first steps that are taught in educational centers are purely technical.

Then you are in the market without the skills that make you a professional designer. Which are not the techniques, but are those oriented toward the video game business.

Normally a team reports to one or more managers who maintain a business vision. Our role as designers is to understand how to realize this business vision. We have to think more about endorsing the product than creating something directly. Players will receive the product packed and polished. Technical skills are important, but our ability to understand the business is critical.

Personas are one of the methods that allow this communication across the whole team. I share with you this workshop that aired last Saturday. The audio is bad, but the content is excellent.

If you want to work for companies as an employee or consultant, you need to come up with frameworks that solve concrete business problems. Thinking about who will really play and how to structure a product for them requires effort and is not intuitive.

Removing loot boxes is a mistake

Published by Paolo on 13/12/2022

Journalists and many game developers hate loot boxes. Players of games that feature this mechanic, however, love them. Just see the comments on this video:

It is true that very often considerable amounts of money are invested in order not to get what one wants. This leads many people to overspend and feel guilty. But in general, the thrill of opening a surprise is loved by the Players.

Eliminating these elements from a gaming system is risky because it damages the spend depth on the service. In practice, players will be able to spend much less money to get what they want. Given the number of people paying for a free-to-play game, this measure can be detrimental and seriously damage the service.

I think that this choice was made without taking data into consideration and without listening to the people that plays the game: the Players.

Surely there is a part of the players who will have left because of the disappointment of spending money and not getting what they want. This move maybe is a way to re-engage part of the churn. But successful games are built on Players, so people who stay and play, not those who choose to leave.

  • They could have tried split testing workarounds instead of announcing the new design before of getting the numbers proving that it actually works.
  • They could have those new ideas running in parallel with the loot box system.

This is NOT how we use to work in free-to-play. It seems like a AAA brand awareness move. I believe that they chose to follow their instincts. They are the experts, of course. For me, it is a big mistake.

Create tools only for good games

Published by Paolo on 06/12/2022

As game developers, we often focus on the wrong things which can lead to not achieving our objectives. We might worry about having the wrong team or not having enough time or money, but there is one thing that we don’t talk about enough: production choices.

In f2p, a mistake is to focus on developing development tools without first having a profitable game. For example, if you have a game with characters with their stats, you might develop a tool that allows you to update and set those statistics. But if the game itself doesn’t work, then that tool will have been a wasted effort.

In the past, it was common for developers to create an engine for a series of games. It meant investing a lot of time and money into something that hadn’t been proven to work. The development team would then focus on making the best engine rather than the game itself.

The great masters of game development have always said that the key is to focus on the game itself. The tools should be developed to support the game, not with plans for possible “plan B” games in mind. There are countless examples of games that were unknown or failed, but had great tools behind them.

In short, it’s important to focus on the game itself over the development tools. Only by doing so can we achieve our objectives and make great games.

AI to improve my workflow

Published by Paolo on 05/12/2022

Recently, I began a new collaboration that I hope will yield positive results. I apologize for not writing in a while due to the overwhelming amount of work I have been facing.

act like you are an interactive romance story

I am currently testing the ChatGPT tool and find it incredibly fascinating. I believe that this type of technology can help me become more productive and improve my abilities.

Using ChatGPT, you can write prompts and generate well-done, yet basic, content. To create truly human and original content, you will need to add your own input and edit the generated content.

Overall, I believe that using ChatGPT will save me hours of work and allow me to focus on other important tasks.

Connect and open your mind

Published by Paolo on 29/11/2022

If you want to stay in this video game industry for a long time, I recommend you connect with many people. I take part in various Discord and Slack groups and this allows me to have a broader view of things. Sometimes simple things happen that make me completely change my paradigm.

During a casual conversation on game design, I discovered this article on how to write good GDDs.

I start with the UX when thinking about a new design. But after discussing it with the writer of this article I have changed my mind. The message of today is this:

I used to think that my client, as game designer, is the Player. But I actually have two clients: the Player and the Product Manager. My duty, during the development of a game, is to provide solutions to the Product Management so that they can deliver value to the Players through the game.

Ethan Levy

He passed me this interesting speech of his from 2018, and I recommend it to everyone.