During the development of a videogame you will notice that many activities are repetitive. Activities like putting texts into a dialogue system or assigning sprites to your boosters.
Game developers use to develop tools to make our life easy in our repetitive activities. So that we can focus, as designers, on what really matters.
From the other side, we should assure that the things that are being developed really matter! Game development, otherwise, will focus the efforts in developing tools.
Here’s a new tool that permits to easily download a PNG icon from our servers so that in our live events we don’t need to make another build for our players. Great idea. And then you discover that no one plays that kind of live event, so waste of time.
We develop a game for Players to have fun. We don’t develop a game for you having an easier life. Our focus should always be on the Players, tools come later.
I dream of making my own game someday. I have a lot of ideas well organized and stored, for someday do them. There are a lot of indie games there. With indie game, in this case, I mean a game that is not conceived to generate revenue or attract some specific kind of player. With indie game I mean, in this case, a game where I want to tell something.
On Sunday I went to the concert of a supergood rock band, the Schellac. Steve Albini, producer of Pixies, Nirvana and so on. Their rock is minimal, super well played and they keep the rhythm like a clockwork. They are very mathematic while they play. They have really something to say and they seem not to give a damn about making huge revenues and so on.
That concert made me think a lot. In fact, we can consider a gamedev team like a rock band. Everyone has a role and an ego. When you have a team of three people really good at what they do, you can really build something meaningful.
I am a game designer and I have a technical background. So that I am not afraid of using engines, script a little bit and so on. I think that with a supergood artist and with a stellar programmer we could have a good base. Then we need at least one person dedicated to marketing and at least one dedicated to QA. And that’s it, then we can be the Schellac!
Dreaming the dream is not living it, I know. But it’s what I have at the moment.
This post is about ownership of the development of a feature or mechanic in a video game. Many companies say that they need people who really own the tasks they have. Ownership is very important but also a little fuzzy concept.
What I understand for ownership is different from what you mean with the same word. It is also different from reality to reality. It is not the same to own the design and development of a secondary feature than to own the core mechanic of a new game.
To me, the secret of good ownership is being able to maintain a vision while adapting to the context. The term ownership can be easily confused with property ownership. If your duty is to own some feature, the best you can do is to build on what you have, leaving the borders of your property open.
Vision
In the world of data driven development it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking “data is everything”, repeating the same mistakes over and over or offering the same formula to the Players.
Data is not everything. Data is a resource that has to be translated into information, otherwise everything can be read. Ownership means also to be able in doing this translation. You need to make hypotheses, you need to verify those hypotheses using concrete experiments and then you can discuss how to transform the information in actions.
It is very hard having the right data ready at the start of some new implementation, so that often you need to rely on other elements to form your vision:
Your own personal experience brings inevitably something interesting to the discussion table.
Never forget that game design is also art, you should put something very personal in if you want to really engage your team and Players in your vision.
You need to know the state of the art, breaking down the same feature implemented in other games. It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel.
You need to connect with the people playing those games and really understand what it works and why.
Context
It is very unlikely to create the next f2p success with a team of 3 developers and 2 artists and no QA, right? If you have a small team, a feature can take aeons to get right. Most of the times you cannot iterate properly, your manager will pass to the next feature and your work will cripple. This happens in the majority of companies, and it is completely normal. Owning your design means accepting this and move forward. It’s hard, I know.
From the other side, it is very hard to create a fresh core loop with a team of 80 people. Politics, meetings and dispersion of the information will make you struggle to properly transmit your insight with the rest of the team. In that case, it is way better to take a strong base and then focus on improving the experience in terms of UX. Believe me, you will save a lot of stress.
Being aware of the context is very important, the magic lies where you can do the best you can with what you have. When you have the feeling that you can do everything with no limitations, it probably means that the context is not clear to the leadership nor to the team. Red flag. When you own a feature, you should try to clarify:
Goals with all the stakeholders
Concrete deadlines with weekly/bi-weekly intermediate milestones
Concrete quality expectations for the feature you own.
Final thoughts
The rise of automation is solving a lot of problems and saving us a lot of time. If we really want to be the professionals of tomorrow, we should focus our attention on providing the right solutions and vision according to the context we work in.
Ownership is one of the most important factors of the future landscape of professional game design.
Few time ago I used to work on a match-3 game for a strong IP. The game never saw the light, but I was working for a company dedicated to design and production of many match-3 games for different IPs.
There was an interesting behavior we observed from Players: many of them jumped from game to game looking for brain training, fun and so on. I had a lot of match-3 games installed on my device at that time. When I wanted to really empathize with those Players, I finished all lives in one game before of jumping to another.
When you run a game app you have to wait 30-90 seconds before of seeing the very first screen. Then you probably receive a lot of special offers and pop-ups distracting you from your purpose: to play a match-3 session.
If I had data and people, I would create an infinite feed of puzzle levels where the Player can scroll and jump from game to game in a quick way, just like TikTok is offering video content.
The feed is a great metaphor
Today everyone has confidence with the feed metaphor. A feed is fast and offers always novelty. Also, intruding pop-ups can be substituted by feed elements.
Swipe, Swipe, Swipe and Play this
Swipe, Swipe, watch ad to get power-ups
Swipe, purchase the special pack
Mobiles are tecnologically advanced nowadays and can support multiple 2D levels on the same scene with optimization. Corporates like King, Peak, Jam City, Playrix and Zynga have a tremendous amount of Player’s data and can use that to train an artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence would help a lot with level design. From one side, AI can help with serve the right mechanics, challenge and visuals to the right audience. From the other, AI can help with the Player Generated Content.
Imagine create your own levels and sharing them with the game's community. Immagine getting all lives and power-ups that the Players use on your levels. I think we are definitely ready for that!
But let’s go in order.
The art of liveops
When you have a live game you constantly work on four main fronts:
FTUE: onboarding and tutorials for every feature of your game
Player Progression: control and balance the growth of your Players inside of your game
Game Quality: improve flows and optimize the cognitive load of your game
New Features: design and deploy novelties to keep your Players engaged
Doing good liveops is working on those four fronts at the same time. A significative workload is taken by the content and level design for every update. Usually, you have people dedicated to create everything using the editors that are provided by the developers. Then every piece is tested intensively, repeating the level or the sequence over and over to double check everything is ready.
The legacy of Super Mario Maker
I love Nintendo. I have to say it. Maybe their business choices are different than we expect, but they have this magical aura to me that surrounds almost everything they deliver.
I think that if you are reading these words you probably know what Mario Maker is. Anyway, I leave you a video in case you don’t:
Create a level for any Super Mario game you know
Beat your own level 3 times
Share it with the Community (become Miyamoto)
Play levels made by other Players
Well played Nintendo! Now you don’t need to create a lot of levels to deliver a new Mario. People will do it, for fun!
Super Mario Maker was a success, people love to create levels for their favorite game. If I imagine to design a new game where Players will create their own levels, anyway, I would have some serious doubt that a new intellectual property can actually generate that impact.
My point, then, is simply that Nintendo managed to save hundreds of man hours in designing levels. When your game is good, people will engage in creating content.
Case Study: Modl.AI
Recently on Linkedin I saw an interesting post by Jamie Clarke:
That reminded me when I was working on a match-3 game, managing a small team of level designers. The process was:
Review the Levels Beat Chart (4 hours)
Decide the mechanics to introduce (4 hours)
Discover all the possible skill atoms and discuss on a new set of levels (8 hours)
Design the levels (24 hours)
Test the new levels and leave comments (16 hours)
Iterate on the levels and repeat all the checks (16+ hours)
Play the levels over and over to estimate the fail rate and the number of movements for the level (16+ hours)
It was a great job and my lazy mind always thought: “can we PLEASE make SOMETHING more automatic?”
Well, maybe now we can with companies like Modl.AI.
Game Pitch: Match-3 TikTok!
Imagine deliver to the Players of a modern match-3 game a level editor using the help of the artificial intelligence. I really believe that is possible to do that, and that should be as easy as sharing a video on TikTok.
Select a type of challenge, mechanics and specific skill atom. For example: Create a 2 boards big level with Chocolate and Licorice.
AI Prepares the level for you and shows you the level automatically generated
A level editor helps you personalize your level, the tiles spawners and everything
Beat the level 3 times to prove that it’s not impossible to beat
Decorate your level: put a background, stickers and some social network stuff that people love to share!
Share it with the community
All the lives and power-ups invested by other Players on the levels you create will be your!
As final note, it would be better to have a successful game already. This can be a feature for top grossing match-3 games out there.
During my entire career I have always heared the same mantra by managers: people do not like to read texts. Time passed by and I discovered that Players read when there is something really interesting from a gameplay perspective to read.
A game is a language to tell a story and many times it’s important to deliver part of this story in terms of flavor texts. Flavor texts are not critical texts, but enrich the experience with more details.
Someone read all the books in Skyrim
Flavor texts can be ignored by the Players who just want the core experience. Anyway, they foster Players to know more about the game’s world. They are an opportunity to deliver more polish to the people.
There is a new technique that facilitates the reading of texts that I think can be applied to flavor texts. It is called bionic reading.
The service games of the future will understand the type of Player and offer a personalized experience to everyone.
A few weeks ago I watched an online conference organized by Deconstructor of Fun, the best known medium of news and opinions on the games business.
There were a lot of interesting interventions, one person made some prediction: Eric Seufert, a digital marketing and freemium expert.
Eric proposed true innovations, he called them megatrends. This post works on the first megatrend which you can watch here:
minute 2:00:56
Ad Networks are no longer able to deliver exactly the audience you are looking for. It must be the game itself that identifies the type of person playing. Depending on the subject, the games of the future will have to offer the experience that that specific person is looking for.
Building on the idea
I have been thinking how it would be possible to accomplish something like this. Acquisition campaigns will focus in bringing in a very broad audicence. I believe that games will need a casual backbone:
A simple mechanic (easy to learn, hard to master) will be at the base of the casual backbone. The mechanic will evolve over the course of the days with new obstacles and features.
How to understand if your player wants more? Offers! We will design offers and try to understand if the player is looking for something more. In which case a midcore layer activates:
The midcore layer is an evolution, but Players should not have to use a spreadsheet to understand how it works!
This layer will add a secondary loop with a more complex progress and monetization system. During this stage, the game can propose to the Players a subscription or an offer that activates the hardcore path.
This is where players who want a more complicated experience come in. At this stage it will probably be possible to put the core mechanics in automatic mode.
Conclusion
The people who pay even a little bit are the ones who understand your game and really appreciate it. They will stay and play over time, for sure. It’s brilliant to imagine a future with games that are able to adapt to the type of audience.
Games like Archero are very close to this concept. Their iterations led them to results similar to those described in this article.
Designing a game of this type requires large investments and a team that really understands how game as a services works. How to get meaningful information from data and work on a vision according to what Players really want.
The casual backbone is pretty straightforward, centered in a single mechanic. A Player should find always content with new interesting mechanics and things to do in short sessions (<15m)
The midcore path offers a new layer of deepness only to people who are willing to dedicate more time per session (15-30m)
And then the hardcore path requires a higher cognitive effort and larger session times (>45m)
In recent years, the concept of metagame has spread a lot. We can say that the metagame is what makes you think about the game when you are not playing.
"I have to open the app to collect my wheat."
"I'll play again because I want to improve with Nidalee."
"They are attacking me, better come back immediately and defend me."
Our life has become very connected and dependent on screens. We have become more impatient, we want things immediately and where we are. Playing video games is no exception. This is why in recent years we have seen the concept of games on demand increasingly develop.
You can play GenShin Impact from almost every device
Also the acquisition costs on mobile devices are rising, due to the new policies and the imminent elimination of fingerprinting. Free-to-play is a type of business that continues to require large volumes of people.
For all these reasons, I believe successful games will be on demand. With successful I mean: big, stable and scalable revenues. This is a great challenge for the game designers of tomorrow.
Venues
The first challenge concerns the places where people will play. It is not the same to play from the desk, from the sofa and waiting for the tram. Where people choose to play definitely affects the kind of approach people have with the game.
Games are everywhere!
If I turn a console on and wait for the game to start I will probably sit on my sofa. This situation will invite me to stay focused on this activity.
You will run a game only if some goal can be reached in a short time, when you are at three stops from your destination.
"Maybe I can beat a level of a puzzle game, or I can put resources into production that I will need later to perform my attacks."
Sitting at my desk, I probably have some time to check my progress and plan my next steps.
Imagine a game about war that is a shooter from a console, a merge from a mobile and a strategic one from a browser. Cool huh?
Fractal experience (when and where)
Some games will likely be the same game on many platforms. It’s probably the smartest and least risky thing to do. The main challenge are the controls. For example, Genshin Impact demonstrated that is possible to find a minimum common denominator. The concept of metagame will play then a very important role to identify all possible gameplays.
I’m a designer and I can afford to let my ideas run wild, right?
For me, the games of the future will be fractal experiences. A person can choose whether to play a game from all platforms. In that case, the gaming experience will be different but holistic. Or a person may decide to play only one version of the game. The war game we picked up might be only a merge game for someone. And that’s completely fine.
The development teams of tomorrow will be able to offer a fractal service. Then the people will choose to approach it when and where they want to. As I said in previous post, accessibility will play a critical role.
Matchmaking
Games with a competitive component will consider all the ways in which a player approaches them. A player who plays only the shooter part of our imaginary war game will not progress on merge levels.
Your Player Journey Map will consider all experiences and their intersections
Someone might think that instead it is better to reward those who move on all versions of the game. Players that engage with more versions of a game should definitely get the fun they look for. Nobody should feel guilty for not doing it, anyways.
The war for attention will culminate at some point. Aren’t you tired of this constant drain of your cognitive resources? I am.
The games of the future will profile and treat Players with respect. Companies must reward players who decide to participate in their game and allow them to challenge others. This behaviours will definitely affect the matchmaking algorithms.
I belong to a generation formed before the advent of content streamers. However, as a game designer, I find the phenomenon really interesting. I personally don’t have the patience to follow a streamer for more than 10 minutes. I prefer the short cuts they make to their videos and I understand why they are so much fun. Some people are a television studio summed up in one person!
When I have to concentrate on practical tasks, for example when I have to design levels in Unity, I like to put a streamer in the background. I choose streamers who do the same thing I do: develop games. It relaxes me a lot, stimulates me and makes me focus on my task.
Maybe it’s survival instinct. Perhaps my subconscious thinks “this person is working and will be more likely to find food and reproduce than you”, so I too get to work more willingly. Assumptions, of course.
Sometimes I think: “why not do it too?”. I believe that one of the great evils that afflicts game designers is the overriding of the ego. This public display inevitably ranks against. This same blog also works a little in this direction.
For the moment I prefer writing. I think writing is more difficult, especially in English which is not my native language. But writing opens more doors and reaches people who are really interested.
I don’t like to exclude anything, but I don’t think streaming is for me. Maybe I would if I was working on my indie game. To get feedback and attention, to create a small community to launch with. To aim for the first 10 positive reviews on Steam.
Today’s news of the acquisition by Embracer Group, combined with other news of crazy investments in new products that have not yet proved anything in the world, led me today to make a fairly radical reflection on my personal LinkedIn. Radical and certainly full of bias.
We tend to evaluate successes and failures in the video games industry in terms of cash flow. The impact of a game on the world is evaluated by stock market experts, who focus on business performance and growth opportunities.
Why then does this news bother me? To understand this it is necessary to understand why I do this job. I study and work as a game designer every day. I do it because I find the idea of having people in the world who spend moments of fun thanks to the fruit of my work truly fascinating.
That’s all.
Does anyone get rich thanks to the fruit of my work? I am very happy for this person.
But that’s not my life goal. My job is to create experiences that are able to marry the fantasies of some people looking for happy moments. The rest is a consequence.
When I see disproportionate valuations for “nice to have” features such as transportable avatars to other games and then see deals made with the creators of epic intellectual properties such as Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider, my head is short-circuited!
I know very well which thing has the most value for the players, between a feature and an epic story. It’s not being able to use a 3D model in more than one game to make a difference in gaming experiences.
The job of the game designer basically consists in knowing how to communicate. Communication is a process that includes several parts. One of these parts is the production of documents. Creating documents consists of a fundamental skill: writing.
The skill that opens all doors is the ability to write. When you dominate the editorial office, you have a lot of career opportunities. It’s also one of the things most of us neglect when we’re young.
I notice a terrible demotion in recent years. Syntax, semantics and spelling are definitely at an all-time low. Someone says it’s the applications we write in, I’m not an expert. I just observe. People’s writing skills have been terribly low lately.
In my days I happen to hear people read aloud. At work, when I give lessons, or even in public transport. No tone, no points, no cadence.
Care of your editorial skills. Write every single day. Read aloud what you write. Listen again. The doors will open for you!
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