Skip to content

Tag: insight

State of Videogames 2025

Published by Paolo on 15/01/2025

As every year, Mr. Matthew Ball dropped a set of slides containing his takes on the state of the games industry. You can read it here in multiple formats.

To me it’s interesting to read these documents mainly to understand the mentality of business people. But those charts and sentences are fundamentally biased towards the macro. The rational side of the business of making games, the statistics. They ignore most of the other part, which exists and it’s equally important. The intuitive side of games, the art. The “we make this game because we believe that we need to say these things”. That is also what makes games so great.

Also, I do not agree with his call for growth. He says that videogames overgrew the countries GDP and then he says that the industry should grow further? I don’t think so. The industry should become more realist, instead.

Design works on forms

Published by Paolo on 09/01/2025

In a perfect world with perfect projects made by perfect people, you make a game only when the vision is defined. In that perfect world, building the game means executing the vision.

We live in the normal World, though, and you see rarely a vision defined at project start. As a designer you encounter a direction that is try to understand what to do.

The best way to serve them and the rest of the team is to make concrete choices and execute them.

While directors are looking at the landscape from over the clouds, designers work on the ground. Game design is making concrete choices on a game, no matter what. From the top they say “yeah, sure, let’s try this but then let’s try that“, and it’s fine (well, it’s not fine, but it happens). What we can do is to execute (if we are allowed to). We should find the “this” to execute and go for it.

I have seen the prototyping as a tool for procrastination. To give something to do to the team while the direction can get that eureka moment. That often brings the teams to a bad track. Many potentially good games weren’t successful because of that.

Prototyping is a tool to find the form. But it can be one of the slowest and more expensive ways of finding the substance. It’s hard to build a vision through a set of prototypes.

Researching and engaging with competitors are the best way to understand the substance. Plus, a lot of patience.

Good news for the ecosystem

Published by Paolo on 08/01/2025

Today’s news is that ex-Annapurna staff is acquiring the Private Division team. This means that Annapurna Interactive (the official one) will continue make “transmedia” things with contractors. Meanwhile, Take Two interactive will focus on live service PC and mobile games.

Win win for everyone. I hope this newly formed team do great things. Especially, I wish they start from small things. I have said this many times, I will repeat it: to me the games industry is like a forest.

And a forest to be healthy needs not only big trees. It needs also the underwood, the little mushrooms. The ants working everyday, the snakes representing a danger. Over the last 5-10 years the expectations from investments and media were just looking at the big trees like Roblox and Fortnite. But for Roblox and Epic to survive, a healthy ecosystem needs also small games. AA games, indie games, instant games. Small games.

Continuous patrolling in Pawtners Case

Published by Paolo on 13/12/2024

Yesterday, I got the third prototype for my game Pawtners Case. I have this design pillar, which is called “continuous patrol”. One of the objectives of the ideation stage and pre-production is to decide on design pillars that will guide the rest of the production and launch.

That means that I don’t want to have a main menu. You run the game, you are in the game. Most games do not need a main menu, especially nowadays when loading a game takes so much times and connections.

Also, there is no death condition. You can fall off the level (imagine levels are islands in the sky) and land on the same level again. I am also thinking of minigames to do.

Credits will be integrated into the game, too. You can ignore them, but you don’t have to skip them.

How to make a stream-able game

Published by Paolo on 12/12/2024

Yesterday I discovered this channel and this specific video by Gavin Eisenbeisz, the creator of the successful horror game Choo-choo Charles.

The man shared useful information about creating a game for streamers. It contains something I have been thinking a lot these days, and implementing in my indie game Pawtners Case.

There is something that PC/Console games should learn from mobile games: you run the game, you are in the game. It is good to welcome the Player into the experience, but often, it gets slow and overwhelming with more than three steps to arrive at the gameplay.

The video features a document containing all the information, in case you are more of a reading person. Enjoy!

Predictions and prizes

Published by Paolo on 09/12/2024

We are arriving at the end of 2024, and every year, we will get predictions from experts and prizes for the best games according to many different lenses.

Until now, I have seen a lot of AI in predictions, and China is the clear winner of the year. The underlying message seems to be that the industry is moving towards cheaper developments and removing the intervention of humans from simple tasks, at least.

The message is that the big-budget, high-quality human craft is not sustainable anymore, but is it? I think the main issue is greed instead. The idea is that 3-5 people in the World need to get stellar bonuses at the end of the year and grow and grow. This is unsustainable, for sure, not quality. Not craft. Not the participation of people also in simple tasks, which are the tasks that made us seniors.

I do not have predictions, as every year, I am a designer, not a marketer. I am a creative guy, and I accept that it’s impossible to predict anything, the World is made by interconnected systems and tomorrow a plane accident can easily unlock WW3 and disrupt the job market for many years.

But I do have a wish: to see great games coming from my continent, Europe. And I do have a dream to complete my game this year my game Pawtners Case. Wishing and dreaming are refreshing.

Do not get fooled

Published by Paolo on 29/11/2024

In recent years I have become an avid listener of content disseminated by experts on the video game business. The tendency is to take the few extreme successes and start breaking them down using visuals with curves and Venn diagrams.

Thanks to this content I have learned to interface with the business side, to better communicate my opinions and design solutions. I am immensely grateful to be able to live in the age where all this information is free.

However, I want to insist on one point: a video game is a fundamentally aesthetic experience. Aesthetics means many things, in ancient Greece aesthetics was the science that studied the essence of things. Video games touch fibers that are difficult to explain with charts.

We are approaching the time in the year in which all the experts will make their predictions, stating them with conviction and using swear words to underline the importance of what they say. Inevitably, this will affect some investments and opportunities. As always, those will not become reality, but then the marketer is always capable of changing the semantics.

I just want to say that it can be difficult to see the reality amidst so much noise, do not be fooled.

Monument Valley 2

Published by Paolo on 28/11/2024

Netflix has many games that you can download and play offline for FREE if you are subscribed to their service. I have completed yesterday Monument Valley 2.

I purchased the first chapter of this saga years ago on my iPad 2. The essence of the first chapter is still there, actually, the art style is the same and the core gameplay is almost identical. This second chapter adds an interesting narrative layer, and the theme is the relationship between a mother and her daughter.

Probably I was missing some little monsters and the patterns that are typical in Escher’s work. I think I would have appreciated something like that, representing better the dangers. The only things that break the order are buildings that collapse when the characters touch a trigger (sequence) and a new mechanic with a plant that you grow and shrink. I feel that more things could have been done there.

Monument Valley 2 is a little gem, a pleasure for your senses, a little box full of life. It’s based on Escher’s art and absurd geometries, but it adds color and animated characters to it. It is the kind of game that shows the potential of mobile in telling stories. It features a narrative full of metaphors and few texts, and I am not smart enough to have understood any detail. But it doesn’t matter, in the end. It’s the aesthetic experience that matters.

Find a way to talk

Published by Paolo on 25/11/2024

Years ago a politician spoke from a pulpit and people listened to him. Today there is a dialogue, real or virtual, with people. Otherwise, the politician has difficulty winning.

Years ago television told stories and people watched dancers and presenters from home. Today we see more dialogues and artists who train to become professionals.

Years ago the blog trend exploded on the Internet. People wrote and whoever wanted to read and commented. Today, various types of social media are used to connect with readers and dialogue. Substack works very well.

Years ago a company created a video game and put it on the shelves. People bought it and finished it. Today a company makes a video game and establishes a dialogue with the players. The video game is constantly updated.

The key to the intricate problem of distribution is to ease communication. Even while the game is being developed. Test the product with performance marketing, but open opportunities for dialogue, too.

Why not “best DLC”?

Published by Paolo on 19/11/2024

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree DLC is a candidate for “best game of the year” at The Game Awards. But it’s not a game, is it?

It would be wonderful if these events kept up with the times. We are clearly in the era of games no longer as artifacts but as entertainment. Living games, updated to keep the public’s attention for many months.

It is absurd to reward only the new, when an update or a DLC, as is the case of Elden Ring, receives so much admiration from the public. The Game Awards should start considering awards such as “Best DLC”, “best live event”, etc. The market moves on completely different perspectives than 10 years ago when these awards were created.