I am very outspoken and I work mostly remotely since 2017. Way before of the pandemic I was providing my game design services to many companies all across Europe. My specialty is game economy and gameplay design for free-to-play. Companies contacted me for three main things:
To set up the vision for some new project of their.
To review and design a new tutorial for their game.
To add more monetization features to their games.
My main tasks are always been to become aware of a certain context, study a specific market and provide concrete solutions. All of that online, by remote.
I remember back in the days when I had to wait for the producer to call me after the internal meeting. I wasn’t allowed to participate to their daily standup because they were too lazy to set up a camera and connect with me.
Then the pandemic came and this is now the new normal. Now most of my work is online, but the processes are still the offline ones. I mean, I didn’t saw relevant updates to the game development practices. And that’s a problem.
Game development has many moments, good and hard ones. Especially the hard ones, when you need to tell the others your truth about something are getting always more complicated. Sometimes you notice that things are just not working out. So you should take the courage and speak with your boss and colleagues about that. You can do it by writing on a “public” slack channel or by contacting the leaders in private and have a virtual face to face with them. Still, with the remote something is missing. You always have that colleague with stays silent most of the time. And most of the time that colleague is one of the smartest. But they don’t talk, so you will never know. And possibly then they quit for a better job. And you remember that you never asked them directly to express themselves during meetings.
The games industry is estabilishing its processes step by step. Year by year. You work on a new feature and you are constantly studying other games. How is that feature implemented there? Why?
Then you discover an article or a video and you see that there are best practices to do that. Maybe a colleague, maybe your own boss show you the best practice. Often time you discover the best practice AFTER you did your breakdowns, your wireframes, your flows, your brainstorming with your team.
Best practices are the best because there is nothing better, right? They are based on facts. On data. On results. On money.
The temptation with best practices is to just implement those, because someone already figured that out. Why reinvent the wheel?
The risk is design something without even understanding why it should work and how to measure its effectiveness. In the meanwhile, a new trend and best practice popped out. Your design is old, maybe you should iterate on that.
Best practices are those things that, when they are publicly available and well defined online, are already surpassed. So that those are just common practices waiting for a new best.
I have learnt this the hard way. Often, people like to make experiments. They hire people like me as freelancer and then they hire juniors fulltime. They want results, good results in possibly a short time. Then our collaboration ends, experiment failed.
Why is that? Because people hardly accepts the reality of games. Making games is a serious thing. You will never make a good game with people part time. You can use part time freelancers, like me, to create specific content for something that already works. But if you want to make a new game you need to really invest heavily time and energies in doing it. 100%. There is no shortcut.
I always speak this clear before with my clients “this is hard, it will hardly succeed. I cannot dedicate more than X hours per week. You need more.”. Nothing. They want always to try. And sometimes they get upset because of the results.
I have an idea for an indie game and I am pretty bored at my dayjob, lately. So that I will explain it here, let’s see if thanks to that I meet the right people to do it.
Do you remember Duke Nukem 3D? Well, the idea starts from there. I was taking a mooc on Unreal Engine 5 and the project was a fps. What’s the best shooter I have ever played? Duke Nukem 3D.
come get some!
Why? Because it was simple, with a great level design and lot of monsters and you could really feel the character. Was funny, me and my brother were continuosly joking around his sentences and that badass attitude.
So that I was thinking: how would it be a character like that nowadays? Well, I believe it would be the opposite.
Duke Nukem was a white strong male. Duchess will be a skinny black girl. That’s the vision, basically.
First Moodboard
How about the gameplay?
I would like to try out a game which could be possibly exported to many platforms, also mobile. Recently I discovered Vampire Survivors, a great indie game on power creep. I would like to test out the same mechanics on a 1st person shooter.
Core Loop
You fire automatically. Just worry about moving and put in the right spot to kill monsters. Collect XP and coins. On level up, the Players will improve their arsenal. On game over, Players will unlock new things with the coins.
Who’s in for that? I think I need a 3d artist first and find out the possible artstyles.
In this post I will try to explain the basics of the freemium economics, because without those is impossible to understand why free-to-play games have to rely on strict calculations in order to work and scale properly.
Costs
When you run a business you have costs, a f2p business has many costs that I can resume like this:
Installs: number of installs we want to achieve with our acquisition campaigns
CPI: cost per install. Each install will cost this
%FTD: first time deposit percentage. Basically, the part of Players that decides to invest something into our game
Team Members: our team is composed by…
Salary/Member: the cost per month of each member
Development Months: the number of months before of publish the complete game, ready for live operations.
If you are working right now in f2p you can notice that those numbers are VERY optimistic. Ad the end of this article I will propose something nearer to the reality. Another thing is that every company has its way of naming things, my approximation is just for the sake of explaining.
Cohorts
When you design a free to play game you should be aware of two things:
Vast majority of players (in my example 95%, but again it’s optimistic) never pays a dime
The payers have different spending profiles:
Minnows: they are the majority of payers and they invest just a little in your game
Dolphins: they are a big chunk of players and they invest a little bit more. Their spending habit is similar to PC/Console players somehow
Mermaid: they have a higher acquisitive power, and they decide to invest more over the time in your game
Whales: they are the real target of your monetization system. Without them, the f2p business is not sustainable. Here’s why:
You can clearly see that Whales are the vast minority of all payers (players that spend something). But:
With this configuration, you can see the weight on your revenue of whales and mermaids.
Results
In this perfect scenario, those are the results:
UA Cost: CPI*Number of Installs. We spent one million dollar just to get people into our game.
Team cost: Members * Salary/Member * Development Months. We spent six hundred thousand dollars to develop our game. Development costs are cheap compared to marketing.
FTD: we have fifty thousand people paying something
Revenue: according to the cohorts, the total revenue is this
RPI: revenue per install. Total revenue divided per number of installs.
Profit: what we really earn. The total revenue less the costs. In this ideal case, it works!
We don’t want to make games for whales!
Ok, let’s make a game that doesn’t permit whales to pay that much then! We believe that FOMO, pay to win and lootboxes are the evil, so that we put a maximum cap on our spend depth.
The cohort whales, then, disappears. Let’s say we just have mermaids, that will increment their presence among the cohorts:
In this case, the impact on revenue will be HUGE. Still, with the idealistic costs structure it works! we can have a business:
Diablo Resurrection
Lately, a lot of press is writing against the monetization of Diablo Immortal, the last game from Activision Blizzard. They say it’s too agressive, I have a different feeling. To me is not aggressive at all. Let’s study its costs.
The quality of this game is very high. But.. 15Gigas, really???
A game like that from a company like that will have a cost structure more similar to this:
I am completely biased here, please if you have more data let me know
With those cost structure, without targeting whales, the final result will be:
Why publish a failing game, right?
Which is why Diablo Immortal, because of its quality and narrative and everything it gives for free has to target heavily whales. This is for the vast majority of people to have fun. A possible cohort configuration can be:
For the whales to arrive spending ten thousand dollars, the spend depth of Diablo Immortal has to be high. Still, in this way our business barely works:
You work like crazy to earn $200k? I don’t think so.
So, I get that many of you don’t agree with f2p and don’t like this business model. But it exists and if you want to be there you have to do very well your math!
During the development of a videogame you will notice that many activities are repetitive. Activities like putting texts into a dialogue system or assigning sprites to your boosters.
Game developers use to develop tools to make our life easy in our repetitive activities. So that we can focus, as designers, on what really matters.
From the other side, we should assure that the things that are being developed really matter! Game development, otherwise, will focus the efforts in developing tools.
Here’s a new tool that permits to easily download a PNG icon from our servers so that in our live events we don’t need to make another build for our players. Great idea. And then you discover that no one plays that kind of live event, so waste of time.
We develop a game for Players to have fun. We don’t develop a game for you having an easier life. Our focus should always be on the Players, tools come later.
When looking for information on how to become a game designer the results are quite confusing. There is a famous video from years ago that claims that a game designer must know everything.
That video is right but scary!
In my opinion advices included in this video does not help those who are trying to prepare for the future. Rather, it helps those who are already on the way to feel very very cool!
Learn to design games
Getting started in game design is hard. There is no single path, but all paths have two things in common:
Create something playable.
Let people try it out by observing how they interact with the artifact you create.
It is very difficult because on the one hand you have to arm yourself with a lot of willpower and time to be able to get something done. On the other hand, it takes a good dose of cheek to go and ask people to try a game and be observed.
In my opinion, however, it is the only real way to learn. A lot of people, for example, suggest joining game jams to get started. Game jams are great for the first point, but they lack the fundamental component: the players. Players are by far the most important part of a video game, from a game designer’s perspective.
This article is for people who want to join a company as a game designer. To be a game designer, you don’t need to join a company. You can create and publish your own games. And you will be a great game designer if you insist. But companies look for other things: they pay you to solve practical problems. To learn how to solve them, you should start your journey from another starting point.
Generalist or specialist?
Game design is a very broad discipline and normally people tend to recommend specializing in a game design area. Industry is also looking for more and more specialized professionals. However, if I think of having to take care of only one thing for the rest of my life it is intolerable to me. I understand the needs of the industry, I understand the advice of the experts, but they are not for me. So there will be other people like me. I will never recommend specializing.
The starting point of all achievement is desire.
Napoleon Hill
My advice is, instead: pick a starting point. After, your career will advise you on whether to specialize or remain a generalist like me. Time puts everyone in their place.
Game design consists of four fundamental areas: level design, system design, narrative design and gameplay design. These areas in the mobile world are called level design, game economy design, content design and UX design. It is inaccurate, I know, but what I observe is this.
Choose one of the four areas, scan the companies you would like to work for and their games. Remember to study well the business model behind, try to get an approaximation of their team dimension using LinkedIn, game credits and public information. The business model influences the game design a lot.
Professional game design puts in relationship the Players with the business model, the game theme and the game itself. It’s creating a language between the business, the team and the people playing. A language to deliver stories and experiences.
Level Design
The level design relates the mechanics with the theme and the game experience in a way that is logical and that offers the right degree of complexity and challenge to the players at every step of the journey. It is a very profound art, to really master it it takes years. At first it may seem like a mountain, and it is.
To get started, I recommend to take games that allow the creation of levels. You don’t want to start directly from handling engines like Unity or Unreal Engine (you’ll get there, just don’t start from there), but you better start from other games that already have their metrics and skill atoms well defined. Plus you can connect with their community of modders and grow with your peers too.
Get a game that allows the creation of levels
Learn the creation system of that game
Study and document all the mechanics and the skill atoms for that game
Place the skill atoms in vertical and the mechanics in horizontal on a spreadsheet and make a beat chart with the original game level design to understand its philosophy
Connect with the modders community
Create your own levels and have them try
Great starting point for mobile level designers
If you are interested in the level design of smartphone games, however, you will hardly find level editors. In the Unity engine, however, very often you will find a complete game of that type in the asset store. I recommend that you pay less than 50 euros to have the asset and be able to work on it. In that case you have to start from the engine, yes. Prepare your match-3 or endless runner levels from there!
The narrative design connects the theme and game mechanics to the story. It’s about designing how the story is delivered to people through the game. The best way to learn is to create fan fiction about popular games and implement the dialogue in some way: in the game or by recreating parts of the game itself.
A narrative designer reminds a little of a dungeon master when you start
Choose the game and create fan fiction
Have a few fans of the game read your story and try to improve it
Create a version of the game that allows you to receive the story as it is delivered, using Twine or rapid prototyping tools
You can also consider of creating a role playing game based on that game
Let someone try the new dialogue and watch their reactions!
System Design
System design is the branch of game design that relates the theme to the mechanics at its base, in the invisible part of it. It focuses on the connections between all the atoms of the game. Normally you need to know how to use tools such as spreadsheets well. However, the best way to really learn system design is by creating board games.
Choose a game you like
Create the tabletop version of that game
Try it if possible with fans of the game, but also with normal people
Iterate and improve your board game
Translate the rules to digital documents and spreadsheets
Gameplay Design
The gameplay design also relates the game’s theme to its mechanics, but from a more player-oriented perspective. It deals with the most tangible experience part, it is one of the most difficult branches and has many ramifications. The best way to really learn gameplay design is to start by researching and watching players interact with existing games.
Learn here how to research games
Take a game and have people who have never played it trying it in front of you
Take note of all behaviors, beautiful moments and struggles
Take detailed screenshots of the entire game and organize them in a file, as shown in the video above
Chooe a component of a game and try to create a variation in the form of a prototype
Let someone try the variation and see the differences
It takes a lot of willpower to start this profession. There is no single path, this is the one I recommend. Companies look for portfolios, especially in the more junior profiles. If this portfolio is created by working on existing titles, and if these titles are theirs, that’s even better!
Few people, in fact, have the necessary talent to create some work that really stands out from the others. We normal people have to look for shortcuts. Better to work an existing game yourself than to create the “wonderful adventure of the boy in the woods” that everyone creates.
When I started this profession my dream was to participate in some really successful game. A successful game is a game that generates revenues, resonates with a community of Players and brings fun to the World.
Reality is that when you work as a game designer, you are not in charge of a whole project. You hear constantly a lot of success cases and great stories in the indie, AAA and f2p industry. But that is not the normality. The most common situation is you working on a game that is not working and will probably fail. That is the truth.
The temptation is to constantly look for a new job, especially when you clearly see that your game will never be published or will never be viable and sustainable.
But there is a value also in working for failing games. You can inspire people, you can improve processes and you can do something meaningful everyday. It is a struggle, and it’s very hard to resist. And yes, you probably have to look out for a new gig. But try to not stress too much: remember that it’s the most common thing.
Our job is not to design the next hit. Our job is to understand the context and provide the best solutions for that contest. Our job is to own our tasks and do the best job we can do.
This post is about ownership of the development of a feature or mechanic in a video game. Many companies say that they need people who really own the tasks they have. Ownership is very important but also a little fuzzy concept.
What I understand for ownership is different from what you mean with the same word. It is also different from reality to reality. It is not the same to own the design and development of a secondary feature than to own the core mechanic of a new game.
To me, the secret of good ownership is being able to maintain a vision while adapting to the context. The term ownership can be easily confused with property ownership. If your duty is to own some feature, the best you can do is to build on what you have, leaving the borders of your property open.
Vision
In the world of data driven development it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking “data is everything”, repeating the same mistakes over and over or offering the same formula to the Players.
Data is not everything. Data is a resource that has to be translated into information, otherwise everything can be read. Ownership means also to be able in doing this translation. You need to make hypotheses, you need to verify those hypotheses using concrete experiments and then you can discuss how to transform the information in actions.
It is very hard having the right data ready at the start of some new implementation, so that often you need to rely on other elements to form your vision:
Your own personal experience brings inevitably something interesting to the discussion table.
Never forget that game design is also art, you should put something very personal in if you want to really engage your team and Players in your vision.
You need to know the state of the art, breaking down the same feature implemented in other games. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel.
You need to connect with the people playing those games and really understand what it works and why.
Context
It is very unlikely to create the next f2p success with a team of 3 developers and 2 artists and no QA, right? If you have a small team, a feature can take aeons to get right. Most of the times you cannot iterate properly, your manager will pass to the next feature and your work will cripple. This happens in the majority of companies, and it is completely normal. Owning your design means accepting this and move forward. It’s hard, I know.
From the other side, it is very hard to create a fresh core loop with a team of 80 people. Politics, meetings and dispersion of the information will make you struggle to properly transmit your insight with the rest of the team. In that case, it is way better to take a strong base and then focus on improving the experience in terms of UX. Believe me, you will save a lot of stress.
Being aware of the context is very important, the magic lies where you can do the best you can with what you have. When you have the feeling that you can do everything with no limitations, it probably means that the context is not clear to the leadership nor to the team. Red flag. When you own a feature, you should try to clarify:
Goals with all the stakeholders
Concrete deadlines with weekly/bi-weekly intermediate milestones
Concrete quality expectations for the feature you own.
Final thoughts
The rise of automation is solving a lot of problems and saving us a lot of time. If we really want to be the professionals of tomorrow, we should focus our attention on providing the right solutions and vision according to the context we work in.
Ownership is one of the most important factors of the future landscape of professional game design.
If you want to hire a game designer for your company, the process can be long. It is very hard to find the right fit, especially for a role like this which touches so many areas of knowledge at the same time.
Tech Test nightmare
The standard nowadays is to make a set of 1-2 interviews and then send a technical test to complete within a week. The test is usually composed of 2-3 tasks which can be completed in 8-16 hours. Anyway, since you have 1 week to do it you will probably invest at least 32 hours trying to get the best result.
Then you send the test out and the outcome can be good, in which case you pass to the next stage. If the outcome is not good, you will have no chance to defend your thoughts and process. You spent 32 hours of your time, nobody pays for that (also nobody uses the outcome of your work) and you are sad. Free work for nothing.
What can you do instead?
Raph Koster in an old post said that a good game designer has writing, technical and artistic skills. Technical tests usually focus on the technical part, but include the other two parts in most cases.
You may want to be sure that your next game designer is the right choice. In front of you there is a junior professional, a mid or a senior (or superior) ones. The process should be different in the 3 cases.
Junior Game Designer
Junior game designers should provide support to the senior professionals. If you want to hire a junior, you should already have at least one senior capable of mentoring this designer. The new hire should be chosen mainly by the senior designer.
2 hours interview
Focus on deconstruct a specific game together
Specific task live, the senior can see how the junior will tackle a challenge
Think aloud to express yourself
After the call, the designer should write a small report on the learnings and the activities and send it via email
Mid Game Designer
Those people are already capable of working autonomously on specific tasks. They don’t have to work always on a strict supervision. They start to contribute to the game vision meaningfully. They are capable of facilitating brainstorming sessions and creative meetings.
2 hours interview with development team
Portfolio review with deep discussions on problems faced and problem solving
Creative session simulation
After the meeting, send notes and ideas selections
Senior Game Designer
A senior is someone capable of understanding the context, analyze potential solutions and find the best fit for the game scope. We fought many battles and faced many problems already.
2 hours interview with design team
Provide a specific context and see how the designer solves the problem
Collaborate with the designers for them to be successful at the interview, not to filter them out
After the meeting, let the designer prepare a small presentation or demo
Arrange another interview with the presentation or demo and comment deeply with the team
Conclusions
When you are alone completing a technical test, you are applying your professional knowledge to complete specific task. You are working.
Nobody pays you for that. You are working for free.
It does not matter that the challenge is so cool or that the company is so important. They will not use your work to make profit, but still you worked for free.
The right company for you is the company that sets you for the good during the interview. The interview process is not to discard people, but to find the right fit! Support your candidates to see their true potential, instead of trying to spot what doesn’t work. And don’t worry to find the best of the best. There is always someone better, of course, the important is to find someone great for the position.
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