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Tag: ideas

Inspiration and steal

Published by Paolo on 12/09/2024

I come to your house and I like your sofa, a lot. Then I can decide:

  • I’ll go buy one from my own apartment
  • I’ll steal it!

The first choice is similar to taking inspiration. Inspiration is doing my thing inspired by yours. It is different from stealing, which is taking your thing to do mine.

The current trend, I am sure it will end soon, is to use tools that take other people’s job and give it to you mixed with other robbed stuff. Which is worse than stealing, at least when you steal you know the victim. Here we’re talking on another level, completely.

It’s inevitable, they say. Well, it’s not. I am against that. You should too.

Blue and red

Published by Paolo on 10/09/2024

Every business owner I engaged with in the last 5 years wanted to find a blue ocean. If you manage to find a blue ocean, they said, you can eventually make it. If you work in a red ocean, instead, is too risky.

But then I look at the history of every successful game out there, and also every successful product. I see that they didn’t find any ocean. They found a niche. And they found them also in red oceans.

An ocean is a deep, dark liquid full of mysteries. A niche is a calm, safe place made out with people. Isn’t that easier?

The “deconstructor” is not fun anymore

Published by Paolo on 09/09/2024

It’s easy to talk about other projects when we are off the hook. Using strong words is also easy to gain traction. That’s what the whole business of podcasts is based on, in the end.

Enrico Fermi used to say that you should never read a book on inventions written by someone who has never invented anything.

The same is valid for what we decide to watch and listen, I guess.

On success and failure

Published by Paolo on 30/08/2024

I posted a question on my LinkedIn, and most of the answers misinterpreted it. It’s part of the deal of posting thoughts on something so noisy as a social network.

Someone claimed that you should work on something trend-setting when you work on a game. You shouldn’t follow trends. I do agree, but let’s be real: that rarely happens.

If you have the luxury to work on a videogame, you will probably work on a game that never ships. And if it ships, the probability that nobody will play it is high. And if people play it, they will very likely find it a boring or average game. And if instead, it is a good game, the odds are that it will be not great…

What’s the point of my rant? I prefer to focus on the beauty of my craft, intended to my progress within it, and the people I work with. Because making games to be rich and famous can be too much delusional for someone like me.

On compromise and experience

Published by Paolo on 26/08/2024

“I sit here
drunk now.
I am
a series of
small victories
and large defeats
and I am as
amazed
as any other
that
I have gotten
from there to
here
without committing murder
or being
murdered;
without
having ended up in the
madhouse.

as I drink alone
again tonight
my soul despite all the past
agony
thanks all the gods
who were not
there
for me
then.”


― Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

The Concord game is out and it looks like a failure. People have worked for 8 years to something that will be shut down in the next few months. 8 years ago, the Overwatch fever brought many companies to invest in this new genre. We are seeing new games with Marvel and Star Wars IPs coming out these days.

The developers have accumulated experience and developed a compromise towards their colleagues over the past 8 years. They made something beautiful. The game is great, but its personality is not in line with the market right now. You can still see beauty, experience, and design.

Can we consider that their job has gone down the drain? It depends on how you see your work. If you are in the “American dream” of making lots of money and success in a few time, maybe yes. Maybe you just lost your time with a failure.

They have worked for 8 years together with other experts. They are more savvy now. Next projects will be benefit from all this. Maybe someone will go and build something different, something new.

The time we invest into our craft is never lost.

Pawtners Case

Published by Paolo on 21/08/2024

Today I have completed a set of new mechanics which will be useful for the very first prototype of my game. You can watch here:

I have also changed the name of the game, after listening to the first feedback on a Discord server. The game will be called Pawtners Case, I am studying also layouts for a possible capsule. This is what I got so far:

I am impressed by Unreal Engine. I don’t know why I didn’t use it until now. It has a whole gameplay framework already implemented, you can set things up very easily. And placing object in the level is fairly simple. It doesn’t have the huge community that Unity has, but it’s a powerful tool.

Now I need to focus on the level for the first prototype, and double check which mechanics I am missing.

Snifferson & Solvito: Paws on the case

Published by Paolo on 19/08/2024

I discovered that AEVI, a local association that helps game developers in Spain, activated a help plan for independent developers. They help you financially with the development of a prototype.

My first solo dev game in Unreal Engine is taking shape! I am excited, and I am willing to keep things very small and doable. I want to make a complete game in 6 months, and I can add 2 more for QA and debugging but that’s it.

My intention is to keep things fairly simple:

  • You control a police dog and your goal is to help your human companion solve a case
  • No dialogues, just emojis to express emotions. I want to avoid too many terms to translate. You can develop a relationship with your human colleague which will help you during levels
  • As a dog, you can find valuable items (+$) but also damage the environments (-$) and this will influence the economy of the central station
  • Everytime you perform some action you will learn more abilities during the level which can be useful to solve the case, so you decide
  • No violence, PEGI 12, E10+ game. Explosions and shots will be funny using ragdolls and silly animations

Dog game

Published by Paolo on 16/08/2024

When I was younger I was addicted to TV shows with a policeman and a dog. The most famous one was called Tequila & Bonetti. I still remember that piano music that Bonetti played at night, recalling his dark past.

I am studying Unreal Engine and I had an idea: an action game with a story where you are the dog and have to solve situations to move forward with the story.

For now it’s called simply “Dog game”, I am implementing the first mechanics.

Follow here the development of this game

Podcasts and analysis paralysis

Published by Paolo on 14/08/2024

I am an avid podcast consumer. I love them, they are a bridge to knowledge that is hard to get otherwise. Through podcasts, I can listen the words of true experts. And for FREE.

As with everything in life, it comes with a cost. When I work on a project, I have clear references to consider. Often, those are words from experts that I got through a podcast. And, most of the time, those are words that stop some creative impulse.

It’s because podcasts are about things that already exist. Often, things that failed and why they failed. Sometimes, experts are not actual doers, but just analysts.

Discernment is a great quality to have for your creativity.

Creating content

Published by Paolo on 12/06/2024

“The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.” (G. Orwell, 1984)

Videogames, like music, are perceived by some people working or investing in them as “content”. That’s where the very concept of creativity starts to be corrupted up to a level that is hard to answer quickly to some issue.

Creativity to me has more to do with removing things than adding. It’s like you throw the clay, or something like that, and then you start to dig material away from it.

Everyone who worked with me can confirm this, I start very ambitious and then I work shoulder by shoulder with engineers and artists to remove stuff. It’s better to have 1 thing well polished than 5 generic. It’s better to enhance a strong part of a game than to create a new mode to sustain the weakest ones.

The dopamine culture wants content, and it’s harder to see this simple truth.