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Tag: design

Everyone should be involved in playtesting

Published by Paolo on 06/02/2022

Playtesting is a key activity during the development of a game. Any successful game runs playtests often to see how the people react to the game set in place.

Usually in games company, playtesting is an activity performed by designers and product manager. But when also the engineers spend 1 hour of their weeks speaking with the Players (or potential players) they can also understand a lot and improve things out a lot.

Playtesting should be weekly, it should stay in the calendar of everyone. Especially for games as a service.

Design tips for the match-3 mechanic

Published by Paolo on 05/02/2022

Match-3 is one of the most successful core mechanics in the mobile space and in general in the gaming scene. When we look at its history, simple variations and innovations permitted the creation of highly profitable services and the startup of entire businesses. In this article I will make an analysis of the very core of the genre: the match-3 mechanic.

The first thing I notice when looking at the match-3 mechanic is that the set of rules represented are both to define obstacles and goals. It is a simple but very beneficial mechanic, in terms of the economy of the gameplay. In fact, the simple action that activates the match needs a previous cognitive effort to spot at least a possible combination. That presents a challenge to the players 

Flow

Step 1 – Problem

Observation/Analysis: recognize at least one possible combination of 3+ colors in line

Challenge: Cognitive effort 

Design Tip: board and art style directly influence the difficulty of this problem to solve

Step 2 – Make a choice

Choose the first you spot VS look better VS deep thinking

Difficulty: time may add challenge to this part

Design Tip: implementing a hint system changes this meaning directly. Some Players may passively accept any hint. Consider:Kind of hint to give (if any)Choose the right timing for showing the hint OR let the Players access to them whenever they want

Step 3- Goal

Match: Swipe two adjacent tokens

Challenge: Interaction, cognitive effort

Design Tip: during your playtests, be aware of the dimension and sensibility of tokensSpeed of interchangePlayers do not like to make a move and see another.Also, if the move is invalid the common thing is to not remove a movement from the total amount, if the game challenge is based on movements. [Maybe it’s possible to let the time be retrieved somehow, to remove this possible friction.]

Step 4 – Result

Cascade: See your choice rewarded

Challenge: Surprise, combo, doubt

Design Tip: here the speed and the bounce of tokens falling reinforce the sense of reactivity that the Player has. According to the target audience of the specific game (and its theme), this has to be tweaked. There is a black box: Players don’t know which token will be spawned and they will feel curiosity about the next state of the level board. Be aware of this.

Step 5 – New Board Configuration

New Board: The gameplay may wait for a stable condition before giving the control back to the Player.

Challenge: Restart from Step 1

Design Tip: the faster, the better. Avoid too much particles and effects left on the board at  this step.

A connection between art and game design

Published by Paolo on 04/02/2022

Aristotle thought that art should imitate life. Oscar Wilde thought that it is life that imitates art.

Is your game imitating life or are you offering inspiration for other people lives?

This is a critical choice that drives the whole creative direction.

If you want to create something inspiring you should think in something more complex and fascinating.

Fortnite with its shooter parody creates new trends among the people who played it. Think in all those silly dances.

If you want to create a metaphor of the reality, instead, you should really be able to capture the essence of what you want to represent.

Hypercasual games brings this last concept to the surrealism.

Ideas have to settle

Published by Paolo on 02/02/2022

One of the things I need when I start a new project or when I work on a new feature, is the time of seeing ideas settling down.

Good ideas are goods after 2-3 days too. After a brainstorming is better to let the board rest a couple of days. Then you and your team will return back to it with a fresh mind and select the best ideas.

And then, again, you let the selection settle down.

It is not always possible, but I noticed that it is way better let ideas settle down. Sometimes you improve them. Some other time you see you enthusiasm as a team go down and reality force (similar to gravity force) do its job.

Clash of Clans: Brita the Villager

Published by Paolo on 31/01/2022

First I dissected the tutorial of Clash of Clans to get its anatomy.
Then I took some notes based on my personal experience.

The Villager is the first character that the Player of Clash of Clans meets opening the game for the first time. I see margins of improvements for this specific character. She helps the Players understand the game’s basics, but especially in the second part of the tutorial she is too formal. The Players will learn the core loop of the game with the help of standard messages. My goal is to improve the narrative function of this character making her more memorable.

The Lens of Problem Statement

The main reference is taken from one of my favorite TV shows: Norsemen. Particularly, my intention is to use as a guide the character of Liv interpreted by Kristine Riis.

Find her description on this website

“Can Liv from the Norsemen become a character capable of engaging the newbies of Clash of Clans better than the Villager?”

Problem Statement

Resuming:

  • Target: Newbie Players of Clash of Clans
  • Challenge: transform Liv in the new Villager
  • Playtest: observe people that never played Clash of Clans react to the new tutorial and check heuristics

Ideation

I created a brainstorm framework using chapter 6 of the book Game Writing – Narrative Skills for Videogames. Mr. Andrew S. Walsh writes an essay on game characters. The chapter invites game writers to reflect on the Gameplay Purpose VS Narrative Purpose of the character we create. 

Summary of brainstorming process with ideas already selected

The new Villager should onboard the Players, teach them the game’s basics and also reward them when they do good.

Narratively speaking, if I imagine Liv from the Norsemen having to do that: 

  1. I imagine pretty exaggerated reactions toward the success (she is capable of doing anything for her status). 
  2. I imagine her getting a little bit in the way of the Players, in order to achieve what she wants. 
  3. She may also reveal secrets, things she believes she only knows. 

Thinking in adjectives, Liv is generally grumpy (except when she wants something). Grumpy can be funny for the Players, let’s keep this adjective for her personality.

Regarding traits, my brainstorm was focused in finding the right governing, conflicting and secondary traits. After reflecting, double checking the pre-existing tutorial dialogues, I believe that the fact that Liv is a gold digger can be a good reference as a conflicting trait. So I decided that the governing one should be something more like Prudent: showing care and thought for the future. I think that it is a positive trait, since this character will also show the future of the game to the Players, in the revised tutorial. In order to further mitigate the “gold digger” trait, using the same book as reference I opted for “honorable” as a secondary trait.

Final Touches

I notice that the last drawing of the villager has a collar. So I looked for Viking professions and I found the trader and the jewelry maker pretty interesting for my purpose.

Finally, a good character has a name. I looked for Viking names and their meaning and I found an interesting link. The name Brita means ‘dignified’ or ‘noble’, which fits the personality of the new Villager!

What’s next?

Time to revise the dialogues of the tutorial and see if Brita may work the way I am thinking of her.

Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames

Published by Paolo on 30/01/2022

This book is one of the best I have ever read on the art of making games.

I like books that permit me to create my frameworks easily. This is one of those. Multiple authors so that you don’t get the vision of just one person. And it’s great because every chapter brings insight, practical examples and a final set of exercises to make in order to grow as game writer.

I loved it!

Clash of Clans notes on tutorial

Published by Paolo on 29/01/2022

Read the first part of the analysis here.

In this second part I want to write on what I experienced personally during the tutorial experience. It is very important to write down notes for a game designer.

If you have no time for that, you have no time to learn.

The game welcomes you with the main view of the Village. Here the Player can already decide “this is my kind of game” or quit. The welcome is given by the Villager, one of the two characters introduced in the tutorial. The girl has changed visually:

Her expressivity has become more exaggerated and her proportions are nearest to the beauty standards. I preferred the old one, since she reminded me more of a tough and rude viking. But I get why this one was selected: especially on a small screen you need to emphasize gestures and expressions.

The first mechanic is introduced. The tutorial makes you build a cannon to defend from a goblins’ raid. The sequence is pretty memorable. The goblin is fun and informal, but uses sophisticated words and spells correctly. The animation after the build, which is an idle mechanic with its rewards per se in the game. The defense mechanic is not completely introduced to the Players. Players will learn it alone later simply by playing and discovering they can tap on graves to earn some extra elixirs. Which is pretty smart!

Just after, the Player learns the attack feature and all of its mechanics. A group of 5 wizards join your village and you can use them to get revenge with the goblins. First of all, I believe that wizards are chosen because they are narratively meaningful. In fact the Villager has explained that your village is built on a Ley Line, so that your buildings will auto-repair. Magic is on the air. Second, wizards are pretty fast destroying buildings which is great to keep the tutorial shorter. Last, wizards are a kind of troops that a Player can unlock later in the game. So that the Players can get a hint of future unlocks and test two troops during the tutorial (later, they will use the barbarians).

Read the historic deconstruction made by Deconstructor of Fun here

The third part of the tutorial puts its focus on the importance of building and improving your village. I believe that the Developers, after giving an hint on the possible thrills and best moments, considered proper for the Players to really learn the core loop deeply. The Player builds 5 important resources, completing the core loop five times. It is more than enough to learn the basics of the game. 

The tone of the Villager is very formal, and that is when I want to work for personal exercise the next few days. I believe that this part hasn’t aged well and I would like to improve it as an exercise. Many clones of this fantastic game popped out and also many evolutions are at the door. The next successful game can be possibly based on this masterpiece. Especially for new players, I believe that the Villager is a character which should have a more relatable personality. Messy, complicated and interesting. Just like people in real life!

The 2022 tutorial ends with one of the newest features of the game: challenges and rewards. The overview is too fast and based on skipping dialogues, more than actually learning something meaningful like in the first part. Which makes the tutorial experience ending with many questions. This can be interesting for newbie Players, especially for the most hardcore part of the audience that can perceive suddenly that this game is not linear but deep.

When the Players return into the SHOP section, they will find the first offer which is the third builder. No pop-up, no constant prompts looking for no-brain conversions. The value is there. During the tutorial you entered the SHOP enough times and now you know that the SHOP is critical to the experience. You will find the offer and, if you want, you will convert. That is what I call: treating Players with respect.

Clash of Clans tutorial anatomy

Published by Paolo on 28/01/2022

This weekend I want to do an experiment, the first series of articles. This one is dedicated to one of my favorite games of all the times: Clash of Clans. The purpose of this post is to share my way of breaking down the tutorials of the games I play.

Being scrappy is OK

There is a simple process you can follow, it takes a work day more or less:

  • Play the game recording the session
  • Create the brickfile for the Tutorial
  • Use a spreadsheet to dissect everything

The result is something like this

You can see the google sheet here and make your copy if you want.

  • The first two columns are the report of every dialogue step by step
  • Then I detail the feature (or mechanic) the game wants to teach every step and the action needed to pass to the next step
  • I take notes on narrative. The character speaking and the word count are important for the translation budget. The dimension of every script, in fact, depends directly on the number of characters speaking and the locations used. You can check out this masterclass on short stories.
  • Finally, I put my bias into commenting on the narrative, assigning an intensity score to every beat and focusing on the tone. For reference, I left the list of tones in a separate tab. The list is taken from this article.

Intensity score goes from 1 to 5, and:

  1. Already seen, not exciting
  2. New thing on screen, still not exciting
  3. Interesting
  4. Cool surprise
  5. Thrill

It is just a personal valuation useful to me to see where I would like to improve the things!

An opportunity for role playing video games and NFTs

Published by Paolo on 25/01/2022

There is something that I have always missed out while playing role playing video games: interpretation.

Producing a story with many branches and possible endings costs too much, then you have to translate it in many languages. That is simply not viable. Reproducing that feeling of “do whatever you want” that is present in tabletop role playing games is hardly achieved by the videogames of today.

You will also need a human (dungeon master) to adapt the scene and the story to the spontaneity of the moment.

What we have

What is possible right now is to provide tools for the people to connect together in a server. Create and explore virtual worlds, also in real time. 

Having a customized avatar that can interact with things and make gestures is also pretty suitable nowadays.

I was just thinking that maybe those new technologies which promise uniqueness and decentralization may grant tabletop role players being rightly represented inside a virtual community.

The journey

You start playing some designed adventure, just to get in touch with the controls and functionalities from a Player standpoint. Then you can look for your first party. 

When you reach a certain status in the community, playing or mastering stories, the game government (developers) recognize your contribution by issuing NFTs.

If you are a player, the more you play, the higher the value of the Character (PC) represented by the NFT. You can sell it and start with new characters. New players may decide to buy a PC and skip the process of getting noticed, for instance. Developers earn a part of every transaction.

If you are a DM the Worlds and Stories you create will become publicly  visible and free for everyone. You may want to pay for the developers to issue you a World-NFT or Story-NFT. Having one of those you can decide to let parties having an entry fee to your adventures, because you got a name in the community. As a dungeon master you should also create and use NPCs. The more you use those, the more your Players will be able to get in touch with them and enrich their background. Developers may decide to issue you an NFT to the highly recognized NPCs inside of the community, encouraging you to create meaningful NPCs.

Your creativity and interpretation, in that way, can be truly compensated!

A method to think in a new game

Published by Paolo on 09/01/2022

One of the first book I have read to learn game design is one of the best books ever made: The Art of Game Design, by Jesse Schell. I find it the perfect balance between inspirational and practical book. That is why I always suggest start from this book, and some other one.

In one of the first chapters there is a tetrad that the author shows to explain the four main pillars of any game (not just video game):

I still use this tetrad combining it with the classic application of the Pareto’s principle: a new game should be 80% some existing game plus 20% novelty.

Where do I search for the novelty?

I always start from the experience and the feelings we want to give to the Players. Once is decided, generally it is easy to spot the best pillar to innovate on.

Maybe we just want to bring a specific game genre to a new platform. Let’s focus on technology. King is making billions just on this simple concept. They were the first in bringing the match-3 experience to mobile phones with a shared progression with Facebook. Technology was their strength.

Often, we just want to focus on a specific mechanic to bring the same story to the same audience. That are what indie developers do many times, for instance with the game Baba is You.

Maybe we want to create the next roleplaying game? It’s not necessary to invent new mechanics and combat systems, those can just be improved on existent titles. We may want instead find a great story to tell. It is what Horizon: Zero Dawn brought to the industry.

A game can be very successful also if we just amaze the Players with beautiful visuals and sound FXs. Look at GRIS and the beauty of its art and music, for instance.