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Tag: ideas

Always a game designer

Published by Paolo on 21/06/2023

A lot of game designers when entering the world of games as a service become product managers.

They then go from working “in the product” to working “on the product”.

Probably in this way, they can access better salaries and not have to go through too many filters to see their ideas realized. Being a game designer in an industry where everyone interprets data in their own way is a big challenge. It takes a lot of patience and really trying to adjust to one’s view, even if it’s totally wrong.

I like to focus on the craft of game design. While I have my own way of looking at the data, I recognize that it is likely clouded by personal bias. So I prefer to focus on grounding ideas and bridging teams.

When a product manager tells the team that “we need to put our efforts into improving D1 retention”, the effect is like an orchestra of monkeys with trombones and drums. It means nothing in the mind of anyone who wants to know where to put the effort. The technical artist or programmer wants to know what they have to do, the numbers don’t make sense.

A game designer, on the other hand, knows that the product manager is referring to having a clearer core loop and a more powerful hook. Therefore, I will create a list of assets needed to unlock that technical artist. A series of configurations and flows to unlock the programmers.

For me, the step forward is not to become a product manager. The step forward for my career is dedicating myself to better games. But I will always remain a game designer.

Data informed lenses

Published by Paolo on 15/06/2023

I’m just a regular-everyday-game-designer. The best game design book is The Art of Game Design.

I always use its deck of lenses. In my case:

  • I used them the first years of my path trying to convince people more expert than me (with scarce results)
  • I abandoned them to focus on data-driven approaches. I was readapting industry trends and practices to the games where I was working on. That is what a mid-game designer does in free-to-play.

Now with the experience, I am integrating those into my workflow again! Thesis, antithesis, and now synthesis.

Take a look at this one.

How can we use this in the data hegemony we have today?

You want to make a new game and need to run a couple of CPI tests, IPM, or whatever. You want to find the right experience to design.

  • What emotions do you want to show in your creatives? why?
    • KPI: Number of impressions
  • What emotions are Players (including me) having when they decide to click? Why?
    • KPI: click-through rate (CTR)
  • How can I bridge the gap between the emotions players are expecting and the emotion I’d like them to have in the game?
    • KPI: Installs per mile (IPM)

Data-informed indie development

Published by Paolo on 07/06/2023

I have a soft spot for indie game development. Yesterday I listened to the words of a developer friend who was generous enough to share his battles.

The metrics coming from the Players behavior inside of the game are ignored. This is very different from the game-as-a-service approach.

Game design has an artistic and a scientific component. The latter is based on hypotheses, theories, and experiments. The experiments before were only manual (playtest). After the advent of big data, machines can help us simulate the real world and conduct other kinds of experiments. Free-to-play games aim for a very high volume of players, that’s why you need a data-informed approach to update them properly.

Indie games, on the other hand, keep their focus on creating an original idea designed to please a niche. They are much riskier because there is no data-informed approach that allows a team to learn from one game to be better in the next. The game develops, publishes, and moves on to the next one.

One trend I see in free-to-play mobile is keeping an eye on the indie world for interesting core loops to adapt. Indie developers should in turn “steal” the data-informed approach to improve their processes. They can develop the next game more consciously.

Indie metrics starter pack

Let’s take the example of an indie Metroidvania game in early access on Steam. Let’s say the team has an update roadmap in mind. As an outcome, they want to create a DLC calendar that makes sense.

First Time Player Experience

The first thing to keep track of is the First Time Player Experience. Represents love at first sight, the hook. Its effectiveness can be measured in two ways:

  1. D1 retention: the % of total players who return to play after the 24 hours.
  2. FTPE Funnel: the % of total players who leave the game at each step that belongs to the first experience. We virtually put markers and measure how many people fail each one.

Difficulty curve

Level design is very important in this type of game. It is necessary to have a beat chart designed to measure the failure rate of each segment or level of the game. I suggest to measure:

  • Drop rate: the number of players who leave the game at each level or segment
  • Average completion time: the average time to complete the level or segment
  • Average attempts: the average number of attempts to complete the level or segment

This will measure the difficulty of your game and where you should tweak the levels or segments. In this way, during early access, we can make fixes effectively not just based on what we read on reviews.

Retention for DLCs

Last thing, the metrics needed to create a post-launch DLC roadmap. The best way to create an effective roadmap is to understand which game features people engage with the most. Players may prefer to find secrets or exciting battles. We can measure the retention and engagement of players who:

  • unlock certain achievements
  • eliminate many enemies
  • they discover secrets
  • they spend more time reading the dialogues and exploring
  • they use certain skills

Retention is measured by days. We need to check if a player returns after 24 hours, after 48, 72, etc. Those are, respectively, D1, D2, D3… retention!

Engagement is the number of times the Player runs the game over a 24-hour period. Then we check the average time spent in each game session.

We can use retention and engagement to create cohorts, subset of Players. Then we can think in an effective DLC roadmap to target the most interesting and decide a pricing strategy effectively.

Internal and external storytelling

Published by Paolo on 01/06/2023

Everything tells us a story. Human beings have natural connections that make them very sensitive to narratives.

We create internal ones and receive external ones. The internal ones are personal to each one and depend on a whole series of factors. External ones arrive massively in recent times.

When I was 12 and in my little room playing with my Game Gear, the only external narrative was “orders from above”.

speaking of which, do you remember this game?

Today, when I’m relaxed playing on my smartphone, I’m constantly being stimulated by other narratives. Notifications, messages, calls.

As you can imagine, this impacts the storytelling of the gameplay experience I receive.

Some of my favorite games take 10 seconds to start. They show me the main screen and, while I check the things to do, a series of messages and offers appear. I have to close windows to continue with what I want to do.

In some cases, there is interesting news, no doubt. But everything contributes to creating narratives. It’s not the same as placing a pop-up in front of me or seeing a bird fluttering over the city I’m building and deciding to capture it to discover that it contains a message…

Especially if, at the same time, my wife is reminding me that I have to buy bread and I get an important email from a client.

External narratives are getting complicated and that makes my job more interesting.

Writing always

Writing always

Published by Paolo on 25/05/2023

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 learnings

Published by Paolo on 26/04/2023

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!

Mailing list on User Acquisition

Published by Paolo on 26/04/2023

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!

Vision and values for an hypothetical team/company

Published by Paolo on 17/04/2023

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.

The Vision of my hypothetic company

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.

The Values of my hypothetic company

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

  • We love to reinvent the wheel
  • We make meaningful games
  • We look for the smallest viable audience
  • We want to be above the average
  • We are patient
  • We want to offer moments of fun

What are we not?

  • We are not copycats
  • We don’t want to create games for everyone
  • We never develop minimum viable products
  • We don’t want to be average
  • We don’t rush
  • We don’t want to trap people’s attention

Students, prepare the basis of your work

Published by Paolo on 13/04/2023

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.

Forget transmedia when you start

Published by Paolo on 11/04/2023

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.