Skip to content

Tag: howto

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!

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.

The levels beat chart is your best friend

Published by Paolo on 17/12/2021

Before you put your hand on the engine of choice and design your level, or even think in the level itself, it is good to have a beat chart prepared. In this way you can have a big picture of the result of the level design iteration.

The most common way of doing that is by using the most important tool for game designers: spreadsheets.

Prepare a sheet with the following information

  • Level: the number of the level in the sequence
  • Skill Atom: what should the Player learn/practice/improve in this level?
  • Minutes: how much time should the level last from start to finish in a perfect scenario?
  • Difficulty: what is the fail rate percentage of this level for an average player?
  • Skills: Core, Secondary, Obstacles and so on. Color those cells to represent the presence of old and new skill atoms in the level
  • Author: Who is in charge of designing this level?
  • Comments: after each iteration the other level designers can leave comments here

How to self-educate in designing games

Published by Paolo on 16/12/2021

Improve your design abilities adapting this writing method by Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was born poor and he stopped being educated when he was 10 years old. He developed a method of self-education and became great at writing informative texts. Here there is his method:

“I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”

Can this be adapted to game design?

Try this:

  1. Find good videogames and make hints of every interesting part you see. Start from the brickfile.
  2. Wait for a few days and then come back to the hints. Who is the target of this game?
  3. Try to reconstruct the features and mechanics that you can reconstruct. Focus on the simple things, don’t overcomplicate it.
  4. Wait again for a few days and then come back. Does that make sense? Is the audience the same again or you are looking for other kind of Players?
  5. Repeat 3 and 4 until you are happy with your result
  6. Prototype just the things you improved!

The best template to start with game writing

Published by Paolo on 15/12/2021

The best way to learn how to write for video games is to do it. Write, print your work, read it aloud. Reading aloud is critical to develop your text comprehension skills. Do not be shy nor lazy. Read your works aloud!

If you don’t know how to start because you have no time to code or to make a game, don’t worry. Think in the game you love, imagine a situation between two of its characters. The situation can have branches inside, but maximum 2 endings: the good and the bad.

Now it’s time to write your script. Sarah Longthorne released a while ago this fantastic template for branching narrative in visual novels. You may want to start from here. This is one of the best resources I have ever found for free.

If you are thinking in an RPG, of course that will be different from a visual novel. In this case the triggers that bring the story to the players are different.

You should think in those triggers and create your own template!

How to deconstruct a game

Published by Paolo on 10/12/2021

One of the skills that make a game designer instantly hireable is the deconstruction of games. It is no easy task to complete, since the first instinct is to end the job once we have identified the core loop, the secondary loop and maybe some unique feature.

I have seen too many times teams copying from here and there after a quick deconstruction and the result is something like

Not cool huh?

A good deconstruction looks for the audiences of some game and wants to really empathize. Having a document with the core features is nice, but having empathy maps, customer journeys and personas at the end of it is key for the success of a project.

  • Play the game for the right amount of time
  • Look for its update logs: you need to know where developers put the highest efforts
  • Read reviews and study them
  • Look for streamers, those are free playtests
  • Join Discord channels and Reddits to spot the interesting and pain points
  • Run playtests of your competitorsTry to interview core Players

With all those insights, build your Player. Forget demographics, focus on behaviors and needs!

Game designers, do not use Bartle’s taxonomy

Published by Paolo on 09/12/2021

Years pass by and I still see and read a lot of articles and videos that suggest using Bartle’s Taxonomy of Players for MUDs.

Richard Bartle was one of the designers and researchers around the online communities for MUDs, multi user dungeons. The very first version of MMOs.

He identified four different approaches of players of that time to the medium.

What I learnt from his work was that it is very interesting to haver your own taxonomy to create your player persona.

But, people still seem to use it to start thinking in the very first personas as if they were part of a ‘90s MUD. Players changed a lot. Your game is probably not a MMO. Using the same taxonomy for those cases will probably lead to mistakes.

It is true that it may be good to discuss with your team, but you are not doing the right job. Do this instead:

  • Create your personas
  • When your game is running, identify your player personas by interviewing players
  • Create your own taxonomy

Stop using Bartle’s taxonomy, unless you are designing a MUD for telnet. You will most likely not have killers among your players!

Try this when you get stuck

Published by Paolo on 04/12/2021

When you get stuck in a creative process share your concerns as soon as possible. I advise you to do it with conviction. People react quite badly to extreme things. Propose a sudden extreme draft to your team so that their brains are activated!

I usually get stuck on the writing side. Finding a tone for a new character or for a specific moment. Finding the right words is always very complicated to me. I need time that often I don’t have.

Define a tone according with the context and circunstances. Write down lines as quickly as possible in that tone. Try to do it in an extreme way. Share it immediately with the team. If you have a week to prepare a dialogue (that never happens), imagine that you have one hour. 

Pass your draft in slack or whatever with conviction: “I’m thinking something like this”. People will start to help you with ideas and concepts, believe me. They cannot accept that extreme thing. That is why you may want to be it: to activate their brain defenses!

With this technique you will get 3-5 potential tones and various references that I can explore! The team contributed to that and they will also feel more involved with the whole thing.

I hope this trick is useful to you!

Game Designers, use this onion to design your prototype

Published by Paolo on 02/12/2021

The onion model is the base that I use to think in any prototype of a new video game. I discovered it in a video years ago and I have never stopped to use it. I have never found that video again, sorry about that.

This onion model is made to be started from both sides. It works better to start from the narrative side and go toward the center. We have already a lot of core mechanics that are proven to work. Fire, match-3, gamble, merge, harvest, etc.

Which kind of feelings do you want your Players to have?

First question: which kind of experience do we want to give the Players? What are the feelings we want for our Players?

The answer can be pretty vague: “just a relaxing and quick experience.”

Or it can be detailed: “I want my Players to feel they are managing a video games company with its budget and people.”

Usually, this model works better with the second kind of answers. Try to spend the right amount of time in this part.

Then I try to identify the personas. Do not forget to use OCEAN!

I facilitate a session with all the team, in which we decide the kind of narrative we want to deliver. Content has a high cost, so that you may want to start from here believe me. It is good from the very beginning to start estimating its dimension.

Once we have the narrative, it’s time to pass to the progression part. Example:

Narrative: “You are a space traveler. You have to stop the evil Empire from oppressing the universe.”

Progression: “explore the universe, complete missions and quests.”

Do you really want to start with an open world game?

Progression: “beat the levels and defeat the bosses”

Ok, that seems better! Will the bosses have special behaviors?

Progression: “try to reach the best score and climb the leaderboard”

It’s Social, I like it. Is the leaderboard for real? NEVER do a real leaderboard for a prototype!

Only later think in the mechanics!

The secondary mechanic is related with the meta part of the game. Think of your Players when they are NOT playing your game. Which things do they think in when they have the intention to play your game again? 

“I have to enter because I have to collect my boosters” (Candy Crush Saga). Boosters are your secondary mechanic.

“I need to play again because they are attacking my base” (Clash of Clans). Raids are your secondary mechanic.

“I need to play again because I have to beat the Royal Griffin” (The Witcher 3). Spells or Crossbow are your secondary mechanic.

Now you have it! The core mechanic, I am sure, will come alone!

No? Really? Do you want to create a new one? OK.

  • Forget about all that we said and make a prototype including ONLY the core mechanic.
  • Iterate on that until you have it.
  • Playtest a lot, put your core mechanic really in crisis.

Then, and only then, you may want to add all the rest. My suggestion is trying to be really conservative on the other parts if you want to avoid headaches.