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Tag: design

Working with Chinese developers

Published by Paolo on 07/02/2025

Since October, I have been working with a company based in Singapore. They hired me as a freelancer for a Telegram instant game, and then we switched to a PC premium game for Steam. Singapore is receiving people from China, they bring their wealth there to be successful.

My teammates are from China, and different regions. I have the pleasure of working with people from a different culture. I am learning a lot, and I want to share some of my early learnings.

The first is their sense of work ethic: they consider the work as a way of contributing to society. They work a lot, also extra hours, because they must do so. Once, I said, “I am sorry, I don’t work on weekends”. I got a private message telling me “Do not work on weekends, ok, but please don’t say it.”

They see themselves as a collective, so if you say you won’t work it’s like you don’t want to support the community.

Second learning: they are very formal and polished in their way of communicating. I use Felo as a real-time translator (they have bad English) during our video meetings. Sometimes archaic expressions pop out. We are so used to the f-word in our colloquial English, we think it’s cool and friendly. Well, not for everyone.

Last, but not least, you should be very clear when something is a suggestion or is an order to execute. If you don’t specify, they will understand that’s an order. They are very vertical in this sense, and it’s hard to have straight conversations with them.

I will keep you updated with new learnings!

LLMs to spot design flaws

Published by Paolo on 04/02/2025

I just discovered another interesting use case for current LLM tools. I use Claude.ai at the moment it’s the best in class. I use the free version.

When you design on a document, let’s say a GDD or a one pager for a feature, you should cover the most possible edge cases. In this way, your coders will have everything pretty much clear by reading the document.

If you submit a document to Claude, then you can ask it to simulate the coding in Unity or Unreal Engine for that GDD. It will spit out pseudo code and reasonings. There will probably be lots of hallucinations and things unuseful. Still, there are good chances to discover something you didn’t considered.

Job applications do not work

Published by Paolo on 31/01/2025

When I was 20 in Naples, it happened that I was with friends and we met unknown people. And we discover some party at a student’s house to sneak in. Sometimes it went well, others we would find ourselves with very different people. Among ourselves, sitting in a corner, sipping the same beer we had bought to join the party.

Today I don’t sneak in anywhere anymore. I like parties, but I prefer the comfort of being with people I already know. Sometimes I go to strangers’ houses, but in general I like to know a sufficient number of people.

The same goes for job hunting. I prefer having groups of friends in the industry and moving with them. I have a job right now because during the first months of my daughter’s life I played Fortnite at night and wanted to learn how to make levels. That’s how I met the person who then put me in the loop. This is the healthiest way to learn about realities and find opportunities.

I need new metaphors for teaching

Published by Paolo on 29/01/2025

The other day I was talking to friends about my teaching experience. This semester I accompanied some students in their “TFG, Trabajo de Final de Grado”. Their thesis, in short. University has changed a lot in recent years, for a whole series of factors. Society has changed since the time I went to university.

We were talking about the most difficult thing about teaching nowadays. I teach game design and development. For me the most difficult thing is actually teaching!

I am a learning facilitator for those who want to learn, rather than someone who actually teaches. Maybe it’s a question of age and experience.

Today the challenge is adapting to a world where information (and teachings) arrive at all hours from many sources that have pervaded our lives.

I can no longer see the story of the master to follow as possible in this world. I am not a person who goes to the mountain to wait for the worthy disciple to climb it and reach the source. For the type of culture (Christian) I come from, I prefer to be a shepherd and be among the sheep.

But this metaphor must change. Sheeps today have a Pandora’s box between their paws, designed to throw everything into their digestive tracts.

Some days are just hard

Published by Paolo on 28/01/2025

The game design is a communication job and it’s hard. Communication is one of the most challenging things, because it has a lot to do with perception. Our perception is the way in which we see reality. And it changes according to many factors.

You write specifications and something important gets ignored or misunderstood. Your duty is to report that. They can blame you for not being clear enough.

Sometimes I accept it, some other times I snap. Communication is also to say to someone when they are wrong.

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.