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Tag: design

We are all game designers

Published by Paolo on 26/11/2021

There are four main specializations in game design: UX Design, Narrative Design, System Design and Level Design.

Each specialization is part of the game design, which in turn is part of the design. A Narrative Designer is a game designer; is a designer. A System Designer is a designer. And so on.

The difference is in the questions that each specialization asks itself.

UX Designer: What can you do in the game? What do we care that players do? What are the business objectives? Do the business goals support those of the players? Who are our players? How are they using the game right now?

System Designer: How can the gaming experience be broken down? What are the necessary resources for the experience and how do they interact with each other? Where do we want scarcity and where do we want abundance?

Narrative Designer: Who? Where? Why? What? When? How?

Level Designer: What are the metrics? What mechanics do I have? What kind of spaces appear in the game’s magic circle? How long should the level last? With what resources does the player arrive? What resources does the player end up with?

Job offers are always more specialized. In my humble opinion, any extra specialization is a specialization of these four described above.

A combat designer? He is a system designer specializing in combat systems.
A content designer? He is a somewhat UX oriented narrative designer
A game balancer? He is a level designer specializing in balancing numbers, therefore a bit oriented towards system design.

We are all game designers, and all game designers are designers!

Add the big 5 to your Personas

Published by Paolo on 25/11/2021

When I start a new game or design a new functionality for one I’m working on, an activity that I always facilitate in a team is to identify Personas.


It is about matching the profile of an imaginary Player with the team. You can be more or less informed by data and interviews, but in general it is good to focus internal discussions on the players.

It is important to create something that people want to buy, not something that we will buy. It generally marks the difference between success and failure.

There are many methods to organize a Persona, in this post I will tell you about the Big Five Personality Traits. It is a form of grouping people’s personalities, developed in the 1980s in the context of trait theory. According to this method, we can identify a person in 5 traits:

  • Openness to experience. Traditional VS Open to Novelties
  • Conscientiousness. Deep VS Superficial
  • Extraversion. Solitary VS Outgoing
  • Agreeableness. Analysis VS Adventure
  • Neuroticism. Reactive VS Receptive

This system is also called “OCEAN” or “CANOE”

The tendency of a team is to sometimes create personas with an OCEAN setup like this:
persona-ocean-1

My advice for designers is to push to extremes, let team members choose one feature or another in no uncertain terms:
ocean-persona-2

It’s much easier to argue about the various mechanics and dynamics like this!

Exercise: Take a game you are playing or studying and try to think in 3 different OCEAN configurations. Imagine how they would react to the important features of the game.

How to create a repository of the games we play

Published by Paolo on 24/11/2021

I learned a technique that I use a lot from a YouTube video of an industry expert. The technique is called brickfile and is an excellent tool to research and internalize some aspects of a game that we are studying and analyzing.


When I play a new title, I always record game sessions and upload them to my YouTube channel. In the case of mobile games, I wait for a session on day 3 and try to record at least 40 minutes of play by going through all possible screens.
Save snapshots of the gameplay video, watching it again. I use VLC for this operation which allows you to save snapshots using the SHIFT + S combination

vlc snapshots
Take all the snaps and pass them to the PureRef program, which is free and allows you to view them in the form of a grid.

PureRef
Brickfile is the name of this format, and is very useful for future reference. You can easily check the various features of a game and use each snapshot for wireframes, too. In fact, from PureRef you can easily copy and paste into other programs such as Inkscape!


I have created a public repository on GitHub where I will upload my brickfiles. It would be great if it were a collaborative project!