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Tag: design

Nuances of play and personalized game design

Published by Paolo on 15/05/2024

A game designer thinks in the players, not in the game itself. The game is a medium to deliver a playful experience.

Every game designer has some extra to bring to the players. It can be a narrative quality or a special eye for the game feel. Maybe a good reading of spaces to design levels, or the special capacity to abstract in systems.

The first important thing is to get to know it with time. The second is that in game design everything is a system. The system thinking is critical.

When we design a game, though, we design for archetypes or personas. We design for some common denominator. And then the game arrives to real people, the Players. And everyone has their singularities.

It arrives with controls, interfaces, sounds, colors, perception load, and things that are experienced on a very personal level. Each one of us is different, so nuance makes all the difference.

What fascinates me about the clear trend of technology right now, not only LLMs, is the possibility of having a personal game designer for every player, somehow.

If we focus on the real job (system thinking with a personal extra approach) there is the chance to instruct a machine to deliver a personal experience.

Is the machine capable of changing the nuance to meet every single player’s needs?

Think simply in a level balance: too hard for Peter, too easy for Molly.

What if it can be adapted to offer the right challenge to everyone?

My feeling right now oscillates between negativity and positivity, don’t take me for a blind enthusiast.

When I read how the copyright has been assaulted to train certain models, I wanted to retire on a mountain and make offline indie games using VIM on Linux.

Still, the possibility of being capable of meeting each one of my player’s tastes is definitely exciting. Because, at the end of the day, that’s my duty as a game designer.

Dreaming of Switch 2

Published by Paolo on 08/05/2024

Nintendo said that during this fiscal year, they will announce Switch 2. As far as I remember, this is the first time that Nintendo has put a number on the previous one. That makes me think that they will not innovate that much, this time.

But maybe I am wrong, and I imagine which improvements Nintendo can bring to their business.

The first thing is that their controllers, influenced by the competitors I don’t know, got very complicated. We passed from the cross and two buttons to 2 sticks, a cross, 4 frontal buttons, 4 retro buttons. A simpler control system will make more people want the console.

What if my Switch 2 is also my mobile phone? I would buy that. A mobile smartphone capable of running WhatsApp, and LinkedIn and making my work that is also the console I can play with my daughter. A smartphone that I can plug on my projector and play bigger.

Being a smartphone, a camera can add AR features to games.

And maybe they could try to bring back the Gameboy printer why not?

Small nuances in game design

Published by Paolo on 06/05/2024

I am playing Squad Busters intensively these days. Hopefully, this game will work because it contains many elements I have been working on with another project up to last year (under NDA).

I am glad when top developers make certain design choices that I proposed or I was guessing but I didn’t have enough time to complete. “Please, Paolo, focus on this other task” is a classic when I start insisting on some point. It’s like when a singer sings exactly your feelings. Satisfying!

But I was also thinking of something else. I was in the middle of an intense moment. A player with a squad better than mine was chasing me. I didn’t have enough coins to open the chest, so I used a booster to open it.

And it reminded me of a quote from J. Riccitiello: “When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time”.

I remember that everyone hated that, the only difference was that Mr. R. was pitching a power-up instead of a booster.

(In the jargon adopted by the companies I have worked with, boosters are the ones you buy BEFORE a match, while you can get or create power-ups DURING the match)

The reality of things is that we like to win, as players. And we can also pay for that. I respect the choice of putting this element on a strategic level and not on a tactical one. The latter would have upset too many people.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how a small nuance can make all the difference in game design. So that also a bad (in the sense of evil) idea can be played well if we have the right time and resources to work on it.

I completed my deck

Published by Paolo on 02/05/2024

Thanks to the help of two friends I have completed my deck to send as introduction to companies.

“Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are ‘costs’.”

(P. Drucker)

This is valid, to me, for every business, also small like mine. Over the last couple of years that I have dedicated to helping gaming companies with innovation, I had to learn a lot about marketing and innovate my business myself.

I could have gone easier with my proposal: “I make levels for your game”, “I write narratives for your game”, “I will fix your tutorials”, or “I will create FPS maps for your game”. But I am not a specialist! I have worked on so many projects that I consider myself skilled in starting them.

Do you need to lay down your vision for a new project? I am your man. My specialization is in innovation. As many game designers out there, the vast majority of games I have worked on were never published. This is the reality of our business.

I can predict lots of issues and tackle them before it’s too late. My analogy capacity make me create new things with few elements. And I touch everything: systems, gameplay, levels and narrative. I also build in engine.

Hypercasual was R&D with glamour

Published by Paolo on 24/04/2024

Now that the “hypercasual” word is not cool anymore, let’s talk about the benefits of R&D (which is a term for dinos, at this point).

Research and development in video games leads to the discovery of new technologies, mechanics, dynamics, and narratives. It is an activity that is hard to integrate within a business, especially in high-competitive environments.

I helped a couple of years a developer of hypercasual games and, in the end, to me, that was a little miracle. Why? Because for the first time in my career, I saw the fruit of R&D becoming an actual, shippable product. The CEO was happy, the developer was happy, and the marketer was happy.

Proposals were coming directly from publishers following trends, there were syntheses of popular indie and AAA gameplays. There was also heavy research on social/viral trends. I felt a volcano of ideas, that was a good period professionally speaking.

And it was because of the collision of 3 hacks: the CEO could save money thanks to the Unity Asset Store, developers could save time and the marketer could use concrete techniques to reach the hypercasual audience.

Many Players of hypercasual games were tech-savvy and very smart. They loved to find the flaws in these prototypes and they had fun in discovering how to become a “hacker”. They went very deep into the rules (which were the only elements well thought out) and they found a way of cracking them.

A breath of fresh air in a context where timers, special offers, and artificial scarcity were playing with their compulsivity!

Today the business model is gone, because it is not possible anymore to target directly these people with ads. It’s much more expensive to reach them so the little you make with ad monetization doesn’t cover the costs.

But these Players are still there, waiting for super innovative mechanics to break. Shipping “R&D games” every 2 weeks is still an available choice.

Can effective teaching inspire narrative design?

Published by Paolo on 17/04/2024

I love to teach. Every time I am allowed to do it, I do it. It can be videogames, it can be Computer Science, or math. I love to put that seed inside of people. And I honestly think I am pretty good at that.

I was reading an article on effective teaching that appeared on The Guardian some while ago. I am doing it because I am taking a language course in Catalan and I believe that the teacher is really good. And I am asking why is that good to me. So I need also to make my mental model, as always. Designer professional deformation, I guess.

I am also taking a 3 week intensive course on narrative design with Kim McAskill these weeks. It’s very interesting, so my mind makes analogies and connections of course.

Telling stories

Although narrative design is different from storytelling, the purpose is always the same. It is actually the same as game design. Telling something, telling a story. If you want, we always want that. We always want to tell a story, our job and profession is one way of doing it.

And teaching is also telling a story, but you need your students to learn. In games you need your players to have fun. And having fun means, at the end of the day, to learn. That’s the spark of my idea on how to import things from teaching to improve narrative design.

Ideas for a better narrative design

I will grab the points describe in the article linked above and adapt them to narrative design. That is a branch of game design that puts in relationship the systems with the stories, creating settings, worlds, people, characters and the way of deliver them (dialogues, cutscenes, set pieces, and so on).

Narrative design is game design, and game design always creates narratives.

Let’s go:

  • Know your subject -> Have clear how Players can reach their goals: the most important quality of a teacher is, of course, to know what he’s teaching. The most important quality of a good narrative design is to know what the players need to reach their goals.
  • Praise can do more harm than good -> Giving too many rewards early make the Players skip some important step for learning. Players may feel frustrated later and quit, as well as students that may suppose that the teacher will be good with them.
  • Instruction matters -> Stories matter: the quality of teaching has impact on the students. The same is valid for a story. Games do not need a story, but games with a story may literally change lives.
  • Teacher beliefs count -> Designer beliefs count: there is something personal and unique in every teacher and designer. Our way of seeing how to teach or how to create fun influences the outcome. There is no best practice or rulebook, there are beliefs. It’s personal, it’s unique,
  • Think about student-teacher relationships -> Think about player – designer relationships: the interaction of the teacher with the students have a tremendous impact on the climate of the classroom. In a similar manner, designers especially in small realities have the opportunities to create relationships with students.
  • Manage behavior -> Manage behavior! Study the characteristics of your students and the data of your players to be more effective.

ATTPP a new KPI

Published by Paolo on 15/04/2024

Many companies take one assumption for granted: regulars, people who play every single day, are the most willing to spend. This has always been said to me and I have never questioned it. The number of regulars, or its percentage, it’s an important indicator of the success of a service.

This leads the whole team to craft things to convince more and more people to become regulars. Many of them are dark patterns, which work in the short term. Never seen any study on the impact on the long term, of course. Game development is not science, it’s business after all.

This information comes from product and marketing. Companies invest money in advertisements to get a concrete return. Return On Advertisement Spending, ROAS.

Today I want to challenge that. To me, it’s impossible (read a miracle, too) to achieve success without good marketing. Marketing is important to identify an audience and its dimensions as well as make the product arrive at them.

However, the reasons for failure relate very often to game design and production. You need good game design and production to build on the right motivations.

In f2p every time I balance an economy I do it starting from minutes as the basic unit for fun. I have never seen in my entire professional life the ATTPP, Average Total Time Per Player as KPI.

The total time an average Player plays your game before quitting should intuitively be the most important thing to measure!

In my view, measuring that will shift the focus towards the fun. Maybe not a good strategy for big successes, we have best practices for that. Still, a good measure for when things are still small.

Progress and difficulty

Published by Paolo on 12/04/2024

I am reading a paper on personalized difficulty in games and I see this graph:

The graph shows clearly that the probability of playing tomorrow depends on how many levels (amount of progress) you beat today.

At GDC24 one of the talks showed this graph:

Kills in 10 matches of a FPS will influence the probability of playing again.

What can we learn from here?

  • Theory of Flow is always valid
  • It’s about the Player: the player of your game should feel good enough and progressing enough. It’s about them, not you!
  • You need to deeply understand the elements of friction, goals and mechanics that shape up the difficulty of your game.

The present of videogames

Published by Paolo on 11/04/2024

In 1998, me and my brother were waiting outside of a video games shop, in Naples. The owner promised us on the telephone that the game would have arrived for the opening, the next day.

The game was “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time”. Its cost was 120k lire. With the inflation and everything, today would have a cost of 100,52 euros – source

The game was made by a team of more than 200 people and a budget of over $12 million. – source

Today, games with that level of quality have a higher budget and are sold for less money. That’s because of a lot of factors, it’s not simply one reason or another.

Videogames yesterday

In 1998 video games were one of the things that shaped our future as persons. Playing The Legend of Zelda was a life-changing experience. And it was much easier for that Nintendo 64 in our room to catch our attention. We had no smartphones and no socials. We had guitars, a PC with a weak connection, school books, and lots of board games.

The controls of that game were simpler than the controls of the vast majority of AAA games nowadays. The console was offline, you had the game running in less time than today with your PS5. Everything was so simple and so memorable.

Videogames today

Today we have two main challenges, as game creators:

  • The discoverability of our games. There is no friction anymore in making and releasing a game.
  • Games are not the super hot thing anymore. Today there are many drivers of culture, influencers and streamers for instance.

I remember when I read about Zelda on Megaconsole, an Italian zine dedicated to Nintendo games. Nowadays, people have no right to focus on a single article without getting spammed by lots of ads and notifications of sorts.

Combat, puzzles, exploration: the promise was unique. Today, I see Zeldas over and over

I remember my eyes popping out of my head when I saw Soul Calibur running on an imported JAP Dreamcast in front of my eyes. The effect is not the same when you watch trailers on YouTube. Games have lost that spark they had when they were pushing the technology and the boundaries.

How to fix that wicked problem?

The future of video games passes by offering Players real life-changing experiences. Players should come out of a game better than they entered. This passes by really curating the content somehow.

At least, that was the promise. Try to sell a game for 100 euros these days, and see what the people will write about your prices. Why? Because of the value they give to the games today, compared to the value we gave them in the past.

Virtual shops should focus on leaving to the influencers the curation of their content. Imagine opening Steam and having tips from the streamers you love. That’s probably the first step. Steam and other shops should never filter people out, but it would be great for everyone to have a reliable curation of content.

But also we, designers and developers, should try to only push out things that matter at least to us. When I meet someone working for a company with a proper contract, too often I see a bored person who is just doing a job.

We have lost that push that differentiate our sector. We need more passionate professionals, preferably with a broader range of skills. We need to build games on top of what can really improve the life of people through fun.

I am not sure that would solve the issue, but if Players are able to find their games and these games will change their lives a little, also with a simple smile, that’s the way to me.

Game design is facilitation not tactics

Published by Paolo on 10/04/2024

Game design is not a narrow world with stable structures. It is an activity where you cannot apply tactics and win the game somehow. You need to think broadly. You need to understand the culture and the past of the genre you are working on. You need basic psychology knowledge to understand human motivation.

That’s why it’s so hard to build and keep a video game company. The successful ones in the past managed to change things, reading the needs and the behaviors. Today you can recognize a bad company since the hiring process.

When a company sends you a technical test, they want to see if you know the formula. They have no time (they think they don’t) to interview you properly. To me, a designer needs to receive a technical test: but live!

That’s because game design is not about tactics. I mean, good game design. The issue is that when a company is led by business people, as it always happens, they look for formulas. They want to just express their vision and you, the designer, apply the right formula to move the project forward. And then the game reaches poor results, but it’s a market issue, Apple changed the rules, and so on.

Good game designers are professionals who know how to walk into the adventurous world of game development. We are facilitators, we facilitate the act of game design among a team. We want to change the culture, somehow.

When you call us just to make money, well… you get the kind of game designer that later in the career becomes a product manager. Nothing bad, of course, it’s just that I don’t fit in all this story.