The best way to approach any task is for me to sit down and do it.
In the case of design, it is very often a question of starting from writing.
Whatever you have to do, write first. Write everything, do not look around for tutorials and books on how to do the thing.
Structure your task by writing, and only after do your research. It’s better if you write with your hands.
We need to write to do the best job. It is perhaps the most important quality of a professional.
Gambling games focus their designs on feedback and effects.
Each time the player presses that button:
– is spending some money
– is hoping to receive an award
– is expecting a show.
The game design of gambling games focuses on
1. visual effects: animations, particles, overlays, …
2. fonts: very important to see the numbers grow with monospace fonts
3. the sounds and lights of the machines.
Obviously, the heart of the game is the statistical system. However, what is learned from gambling applies to various games.
After having worked for some time in gambling, the Italian developer Luca Galante created a game that inherits a lot from the chip-eating machines. He builds a business around that and wins a BAFTA, beating the likes of God of War: Ragnarok. The game is Vampire Survivors, an indie hero with a gambling soul.
SEGA SAMMY HOLDINGS INC. is composed of various business branches. The main one, as far as I know, is pachinko games. A type of gambling game popular in Japan where balls are thrown into the playing space and can hit variable objectives, which can be converted into money thanks to a legislative vacuum.
Curiously, they recently acquired Rovio Entertainment Corporation, whose main service is a series of games where you shoot rounded birds with a slingshot aiming to hit goals and score points…
(I know it has nothing to do with the rational point of view of the business. But flying balls can be better understood by those dedicated to producing ball-launching machines, right?)
You learn a lot from gambling!
In these times of automation and cost-cutting, one of the most important things for me is to develop my own special sauce.
That thing that no one can imitate, characterizes and distinguishes me. My secret to bringing value to the clients I work for. Truly quantifiable value.
The best game design book in the world (The Art of Game Design by Jesse Shell, of course) starts with a great lesson on inspiration: Look everywhere else.
In the story there is a gathering of conjurers, one catches the attention of the protagonist who asks him how he can be so original. The magician explains that he tries to look outside his own world and import things from other contexts.
It’s a way of making your own special sauce. I’ve been following this suggestion for years. One of the places I look as a game designer is marketing, specifically the world of UA.
Matej with his content helps me to have better ingredients to put into my special sauce. You should read it too!
I work as freelancer and consultant in this moment of my life. I also feel the need of building something mine, since the market right now is pretty average. More details in this video:
So I am fantasizing about building my own company or having my own team someday. Some wise man says that I should start from the vision, which is like the utopic preview of the World once my company has success.
Well, that is my vision: our Players will remember our games forever.
Simple and clear. Somehow inspired by the Supercell vision: to create great games that as many people as possible play for years and that are remembered forever.
But without the “play for years” thing. I don’t think it matters anymore, I don’t believe that it’s possible with this average content storm we are living right now. Storm that is not going to end soon.
Plus, I do believe that looking for extreme growth is frustrating and leads to the creation of attention traps, not games.
Having said that, I would look for just game designers at my company. I mean, of course we would need artists, developers and so on. But I would always look for people with the special attention to the details that a good game should have to be unforgettable.
We are game designers
What are we not?
There is a substantial difference in game design between what you study and what you then work on.
When you study you learn the basic language and how to get from an idea to a game. Most often it is a reduced version of the game itself. When you study you have the largest freedom to create without thinking too much about who sells the game. The ability to create will be one of the fundamental ones.
When you’re working, your primary focus is the team in charge of selling the game to the people out there. You will need a very different set of skills. You will need to support your work with ideas that have worked in other games. The ability to analyze becomes one of the fundamental skills.
If you are a student, take advantage of the beautiful moments of creative freedom. But never forget to play many games. Because playing will build you a library of ideas and mechanics and will be your basis for real work.
PRO TIP: play more games from the companies in your geographical areas. Those will be the first you will apply to.
While the Super Mario Bros movie crashes the box office, Gameloft launches a Disney version of Super Mario Kart.
Two companies with a great history explore each other’s space. Someone says that the worlds of video games and movie productions are converging. The fact is that the types of production of a film and a video game are completely different.
Video games involve interaction, movies don’t. Movies can move from the big screen of the cinema to the small screen of a smartphone, but video games cannot.
The common element is that they are two means of getting stories across. These stories can cause very strong feelings that change us. These inner shifts familiarize us with characters and worlds. These characters and worlds can populate products of an entirely distinct nature.
It is not a matter of bringing together video games and cinema. It’s about creating memorable characters and worlds that can actually last for years.
People are still playing Super Mario Bros. People are still watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I do not recommend looking for transmedia right from the conception of a video game or movie. I recommend making the best video game or making the best movie possible. Center yourself well in thinking about worlds, characters, and stories. Make them fit perfectly in one single medium. With the help of God, successful transmedia may come later.
This game is trending in recent weeks.
As a game designer, I always prefer to start with the basics.
The real strength of the core of this game in my opinion is that narratively it is very weird.
I know that everything comes from Archero and games of this style. But, gamers very often do not know the history of video games.
Many people who will engage with this game, in short, will not know other previous successes of the same kind.
What the heck is a constantly firing mechanical snake doing in a maze? At first glance, it doesn’t make sense.
However, the numbers speak for themselves, which is why I wonder what fantasy it awakens in the players.
The MDA framework comes to help:
– Sensation: the game as sense-pleasure
– Challenge: game as an obstacle course
– Submission: game as a pastime
Those are the three essential keys to the beauty of this game for me. Everything else, therefore, may not even make sense! Plus, it may become a strength. Because it leaves the Players with the fantastic autonomy of imagination.
Think of the first Super Mario: it didn’t make any sense at all, because the goal at the time was not that. Nintendo was building on the pleasure of handling a gamepad and owning a console set for your home TV.
The rest was left to the player’s imagination. To some of us that shaped us, forever.
I like Sssnaker too much! The metagame is average and mediocre, though. Always the same. I know that works but how long will it last?
Generative AIs seem to be a great help for:
Deal with repetitive and mechanical tasks.
– Find bugs
– balance numbers
– create variations of a graphic asset, etc.
Speed up the process of understanding.
– Explain to me what this code does
– Read this long article and give me the best practices
-Explain the style of this image.
Getting past the blank page fast.
– I need to prototype this mechanic in Unity. Where do I start?
– I need to create a power-up system based on natural elements for the next RPG. How would that work?
– I need to make 3D models of a robot cricket, what could it look like?
On these three points, we are definitely facing an epochal change. There is no going back, rather it will move forward. We will lose specific jobs, but many others will arise. We can hardly imagine at this moment, but it will happen.
One thing I want to say: generative AIs have no taste and no opinions. We must have tastes and opinions. The idea of entrusting artificial intelligence with the responsibility of choosing and evaluating is fundamentally wrong. We can use artificial intelligence to understand more. But we have to develop our taste and our knowledge.
If I’m not a programmer, the AI could pass me code with serious errors and I wouldn’t notice.
If I’m not an artist, AI-generated images may be acceptable to my speed-hungry eyes. But I’ll have a hard time guessing what I’m really conveying to people.
If I’m not a designer, the solutions generated will be a repetition of things people have already seen in games that are certainly better than what I can do.
A team should first demonstrate to themselves and to the World they can develop a complete game.
Whether a team is composed of experienced members or newbies, the first thing should be completing a game.
Some team starts by helping other projects. Some others should probably start with something small. Finally, some others may work on a remake or an existing game adapted to intellectual property.
I like to compare a game development team to a rock band. First, you start doing covers or making your own stuff for small clubs. You cannot start by playing at Wembley Stadium, that’s your dream, but you must be realistic.
There is a lot of energy involved in the development of a game, you have to first prove you work well together.
When you still have nothing out there, talking about huge growth and wonderful disruptions may be frustrating. I respect the ambitions but listen to my humble suggestion: make your games the best you can. Just worry about that when you’re starting.
Unless, of course, the team is composed of at least a core that already faced together their struggles. You need to know how to hit the road together before of going to the sky. Success will come by hard work and only a few times thanks to contexts and events you cannot control.
I was reading the post from the CEO of Supercell and I connected it to the announcement of 20% annual growth of King’s game Candy Crush Saga. These numbers are not obtained by chance, and finding a game that lasts forever is very hard.
I remember when Candy Crush became a big hit. For the first time, I was seeing people like my mother play a video game. It was easy from Facebook, and friends with smartphones could follow the progress from anywhere. King’s real innovation was technological: the shared progress between Facebook and mobile devices combined with a trendy game.
I remember when Clash of Clans was released for iPhone and iPad. iPad had just been released and Clash of Clans offered perfect gameplay for the device. I used to work at Digital Chocolate and a team from the company ran the Galaxy Life game. Galaxy Life was a version of Backyard Monsters aimed at a wider audience.
Clash of Clans was a better-optimized version for mobile devices that was using the same base. I don’t know how much they were inspired by Galaxy Life, but there were a lot of similarities. Even in the tutorial storyline, for example.
At DChoc, during lunch breaks, I remember colleagues spending time playing Galaxy Life. The game developers themselves found a lot of fun in the game they were working on. And this for me has always been one of the signs to see for the success of a title.
When you hold any level of Candy Crush Saga in your hands, what you have in front of you is a box of sweets. And you know that too much sugar is not good for you. For people of my mother’s age, but also for my generation, it suggests something childish.
“You can’t eat all the candy, it’s bad for you!”
“Okay mom…”
…and you spent the time sorting the candies in the box with your finger!
With Candy Crush you can spend as much time as you like playing with candies. The magic circle guarantees that you will get no diabetes from swiping all those sweetmeat. And you will not get the temptation of eating one!
When I was playing Clash of Clans, I was in an Ikea-furnished apartment, sharing a house with 3 other people. My reckless side was influenced by Northern European design. As an avid reader of fantasy literature, Vikings and dragons were one of my passions. Clash of Clans offered a light take on that theme. Little Vikings were cute and you felt that you had true power over their miserable aggressiveness. The treat was about their village, you weren’t the hero. You were their god. And the color, the clean design, and the ironic courtesy of speech somehow reminded me of those Ikea commercials. Nordic vibes!
After the success, King and Supercell had the opportunity to contract talent from all over the World. Thanks to a strong base and great experience, they worked to make these services ever better adapted to all segments of players.
On the player side, however, those who have stayed longer have a sense of prestige they don’t want to lose. They feel they own their games, somehow.
Think of the players who are in the last levels of Candy Crush. They have something in their hands that the newcomer does not – they are more experienced. They overcame more challenges.
Reflect on the players who have seen Clash of Clans evolve from the first few months. They can also be guides for newcomers. They have prestige due to the fact that they are the oldest players of a game that has been since the beginning of the iPad.
Did the original creators of these games think they had these results? I think they definitely believed in their game, but something this big is very difficult to predict. We can draw a lesson from this, though: prestige in a community leads people to stay. The fantasies that can feed this prestige can be various: leadership, power, and greatness are some examples.
If we want to make a new game and our intention is to break barriers, we have to explore the world of possibilities. We have to try to identify and overcome our prejudices. I would ask those questions:
