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Tag: design

How to build the next Supercell

Published by Paolo on 07/09/2022

I have a secret to build the next Supercell. Really, I have it! Have I ever built a company like Supercell? Of course not, but I mean: we live in the age of suggestions, advices, best practices, influence, likes, follows… So why shouldn’t I write some wise article about how to do things, right?

As any secret, this one is very easy to understand too: stop treating people like children. Easy, right? Let’s see three common ways in which you are treating your people like babies, including before they join your company.

Technical tests and assessments

In some case those are necessary, especially for junior talent or for talent that is switching radically the sector. For instance, passing from free-to-play to AAA. Anyway, if you are hiring a person in his forties please: give me a break!

Our curriculum, carreer and our ex colleagues speak from themselves. We have nothing to demonstrate anymore and we are completely capable of doing the job at a technical level. Do I really need to show you how I structure an economy in a spreadsheet? Do i really need to demonstrate my presentation skills? Do you want me to create a flow and a wireframe? Or worst, a single GDD bible? Please, I do this since probably before you joined that company. Again: give me a break!

Do this instead:

  • Interview for cultural fit
  • Review in detail past experiences
  • Ask for referrals of ex colleagues and employers

When I see a test proposal I just think: “ok, you are not capable of evaluating my kind of profile. Next.”

Show me the next things to do with no context

I remember when I was a little dude asking to my father: “Why should I do that?”.

“Because I say so”, was his answer.

35 years later, history repeats. And I am very tired of that. You give a task and a deadline, with no perspective. I will do that for you the best I can. I swear. But I will never understand anything like this. Why is this important for the project? And how will we demonstrate that in fact it was? When we shoud have some learning? What about the past iteration? How did it go?

Maybe you are too busy to explain well the vision behind any choice. That means that you are not doing the job you should, to me. Because if you are my manager, you should be focused on manage my team and myself. Not the game. Not the code. Not the art.

Put your hands on my work

This is tipically something that you do to game designers. And tipically something that occurs in small-mid sized companies. We spent weeks designing something, researching, getting the problem right, sync with all the people involved. And then you decide to change everything because you have your own idea in mind. You are the founder or the leader of the project and you have the last word.

I could be wrong and you right, of course. Still, you are stealing my opportunity to learn more about the audience and the kind of product we are doing together. I just feel that my solution will never be tested on the field. Your solution maybe can be successful. And probably you will be happy and still will recognize my work. But you stole my opportunity of seeing a design I made going out there.

Stop play with my toys, those are mine!

Being loyal

Published by Paolo on 05/09/2022

Year ago I was running a very promising free-to-play project in a local incubator. It was very promising, it was the future. My lead artist said: you are inventing the devil. Of course, it was just in my head. The project had no chance to go forward, because I wasn’t being loyal to my will of creating a new company around it.

Being loyal with ourselves is not just to maintain the promises we make. It’s not to respect the compromise. Is also to make well our numbers. If you want to build anything and we consider ourselves game designers it is necessary to stop and think well to all costs and scopes of the things we want to build. And then add a 20% of error to all of that. Otherwise we will most probably fail.

My project failed at many levels, but the main one is that you cannot start a free-to-play ambitious project without great professionals and lot of money behind. The art of giving games for free is very expensive, needs a good monetization strategy and the acquisition of new Players requires huge efforts.

I am glad that I didn’t invented any devil, and I am glad to be here happy telling you those stories.

Lore and freedom

Published by Paolo on 30/08/2022

I am playing Horizon Forbidden West and everytime I meet a new character, the game invites me to hear minutes of dialogues. The story is intriguing and well written, but I cannot just walk away such as in Skyrim for instance, leaving the NPC speaking alone. Different design pillars, different approach to narrative.

Still, a great game. This forceful dialog creates somehow a connection with the lore of the game. So that a new intellectual property is reinforced.

I am also playing the classic Gothic. A game that says you NOTHING about what to do. A game from the past. You have to really strive to understand what to do, where to go and so on. I killed a man, today. I found him hidden in a mountain. I spoke with him and then I killed him. Why? The game gave me 40XP. There will be no consequences to my character.

And that fits into the game’s narrative of brutal freedom and high insecurity. So that I was the big fish eating the small fish, today. It fits. Gothic still has fans all over the World.

Humbleness and feedback

Published by Paolo on 29/08/2022

When someone asks me for a feedback for their game, I try to never give my opinion. In fact, I believe that working in games makes us liable of huge biases that come from experiences which are subjective.

I try to make them questions, instead. Try to understand really what’s behind their choices. Then I tell them what I would ask to playtesters to challenge their assumptions.

I believe that is the best way of giving feedback. From the other hand, the tendency is to say what one would do instead. And the worst is that then someone may follow blindly your advice. Applying that advice in their understanding, not what you said them in first place.

That is why it’s important be humble, somehow. Being humble is being completely honest. In order to be that, the right start is always a certain amount of questions.

Failing at premises

Published by Paolo on 24/08/2022

Successful games are games that manage to meet the right audience willing to invest their money in them to get the kind of fun they expect. And that is nothing new, it’s game design 101. It’s the very first lesson you learn anywhere when you start designing games. You should design a game for some audience.

There are many ways of failing at this. Actually, the vast majority of games fail to deliver this exact point. Which is why video games are a very risky business.

The experience may help you avoid some mistake, and mine has a almost constant issue that I see: failing at premises.

In fact, a lot of times I hear sentences like:

We want to make a game like <CoolGameTitle> but more [casual|hardcore|midcore], just like <NewTrendyGameTitle>.

Senior VP of Product Ownementshipssss (or some fancy title like this)

I don’t know if the syntax I am using is completely clear, I guess it is not. But the truth is that when you want to change a playstyle from a specific audience, that almost for sure leads to disaster. Casual, midcore and hardcore to me are a way of describing the gameplay session time.

It is good that you take your references, but if you are willing to force a significant change in gameplay behavior you are on the wrong way. If you know that a specific successful game has that playtime, you should consider that seriously as a pillar and not as something to change. We can be misled to think that “making things simpler” means “shorter/longer gameplay sessions” and that is almost never the case.

Never say never of course, but that is in my experience one of the false premise that make a game lose the money and efforts you and your team invested in.

Gran Turismo Café

Published by Paolo on 22/08/2022

Saturday I got a PS5. I am so happy you cannot imagine. I was chasing the opportunity since a whole lot and I found mine. It came with Granturismo 7, Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring (which scares me because I am very bad at those games) and a second gamepad.

I wasn’t playing Granturismo since its second edition, so that I lost its tracks. Seeing it in its 25th anniversary makes me proud. I was there when the first edition launched. I was there struggling a lot with patents and so on.

With the power and the controllers of PS5 now I can feel way more the cars. The simulation improved a lot. The game converted to a service. You race and complete challenges to earn credits. You use those credits to purchase cars and parts. If you are not patient, you can also purchase extra credits. The game is a service, every day there are novelties. It has a lot of functionalities, mechanics, features and game modes so that a Player may feel lost.

Menu Books and Compass

Using the italian café metaphor, a character named Luca will guide the Players with his menu books. A set of missions designed to drive the Players.

A yellow compass guides the Players to the game mode and section they have to go in order to complete the challenge.

  • The compass is on the map and on the top bar.
  • The top bar completes the information with a sentence

The Player gets content/story on challenge completion

and with a roulette ticket (gacha) which permit to get credits, cars and car parts

Roulette ticket have stars and an expiration date, so that the Players cannot store them and get the last things after some month (thing that happens in a lot of free to play games). They have to invest them.

I am reading a lot of complaints regarding the missions given by Luca at Gran Turismo Café. Sometimes it forces you to purchase upgrades for a car that is not interesting. Still, I notice than the next challenge is always related with the previous ones. The game is thoughtfully designed.

I believe that when the Players have the opportunity to spend real money to skip time and satisfy their impatience, they can be led to believe that everything is designed to grab their money. You should grind a lot in order to get the best cars. Best cars are worth millions of credits and from a single race you get 2-5k. You have to play a lot to be able of purchasing them. The missions that require you to spend those credits that you are saving in order to progress can be a pain in the arse.

Still I am loving this game and this system is a very neat references for games with a lot of mechanics. Now I want to buy a G29 wheel and test the real drive!

Your game may not sell if…

Published by Paolo on 19/08/2022

You are just making the game you would like to play.

You rarely speak with the Players of your competitors.

You already know what to copy, without knowing why it works (are you sure it really works?).

You feel confident that it will sell, without being backed by concrete data.

Prepare your portfolio!

Published by Paolo on 17/08/2022

Hello people, I am back from my well deserved vacations ready for a new year full of content for free for you! Hope you all did enjoyed a nice vacations with your families and your best people.

The other day an ex student of mine made a question in a WhatsApp channel we are both in: “Can someone recommend where to create a game design porfolio?”

There is no specialized website, as far as I know, to create a portfolio. That is bad, because of discoverability, but is good because forces us designers in thinking out of the box and not using templates and pre-defined layouts.

I personally use itch.io, also if there are a whole lot of things that I cannot put on my portfolio because they belong to specific companies where I signed NDAs. That’s the eternal issue of our job.

Study your target

When you prepare your portfolio, you should think in WHO will read it. Will it be an HR manager? Maybe a lead game designer? Or a CEO? Every people speaks differently and every company does so, too.

  • Look at companies you would like to work for
  • Look at their game designers and try to find their portfolios (you can also ask them on LinkedIn)
  • Create your porfolio using well your references

At the end of the day doing a portfolio is a for of design!

What to put in a portfolio

As I said before, I think there is NOT a general rule, a template, a standard, a best practice. You should find your way and make your own talents shine!

I can tell you what I would put:

  • Start with a video gameplay with most meaningful moment of each exercise/job. People don’t want to have to download anything to see what you did.
  • Add some capture with very special moments, most memorable moments.
  • Notes on what you learn and on your process. You can use the STARR method that is also used by some recruiter.
  • Link to external documents and references. I use Google Drive for that!

Build the game thinking in system

Published by Paolo on 27/07/2022

Making video games is hard and it has a cost. That is why often we feel the need of building an universal system, capable of letting us creating more games in less time.

Players, instead, purchase and play video games for the experience that game has to offer. They usually do not think in systems, also if they are capable of understand what is similar to other games.

To me the best approach is to make a video game. The best is to focus on a concrete platform and a concrete experience having a great vision. Then if that system is designed to be custom, that is great for the production of next games, of course. But the priority is on the game itself, not on the system you are building.

If you think just in the system, I have to tell you, maybe you are not believing too much in your game. Which is completely normal, you should rely on data and results to believe in it from a business point of view. But from the creative point of view you should also notice that little spark waiting to become the next big IP.

Have a nice summer folks, this is the last post before of my vacations. See you soon!

FTUE, tutorial, onboarding

Published by Paolo on 22/07/2022

The first time user experience, or FTUE, is a mandatory thing to design for every videogame. Your players are going to have their first time experience, that’s for sure. So that if you leave that to the faith, that first experience will be completely random. For free to play, first time experience is made of tutorial and onboarding.

The tutorial is usually between 3 and 15 minutes and, step by step, all the most important features of the game are revealed to the Players. In order to design the best tutorial, you should look deeply at the theme of your game and at what are you proud of. If we analyze successful games like RAID: Shadow Legends and Dislyte, we notice that the first one puts all the value in the beautiful heroes you can unlock with gachas. The latter, instead, is very proud of its lore. They both work, the important thing is to really understand all kind of players you may want to serve and like them. If you really like your players, I mean as persons, you will definitely design the best tutorial for them.

The onboarding is usually made by the first 2-5 sessions and it’s the stage in which engaged players will fall in love literally with your game. The Players will discover all the systems of your games, and unlock the first things. They will feel they can grow if they stay with you. In order to design the best onboardings, you should focus on the Players’ motivations and try to bring them values around that.

Things don’t work from the very first iterations, so it’s better to make small iterations and improve step by step your tutorial first and your onboarding second.