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Tag: insight

Starting from UGC

Published by Paolo on 09/02/2024

Imagine you want to create a new team to develop video games. Imagine you have a team of veterans and people with less experience. One of the ways to start is Roblox or UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite).

They are walled gardens but allow you not to worry too much about thinking about the game to develop. Roblox has more players than Playstation and Xbox combined. So there is a solid community of players.

When you start a new project by creating a team of people who don’t know each other, it’s a good idea to start doing smaller tests. So why not try these systems that already have their basis? In my opinion, it is an excellent opportunity to start.

Time for the underdogs

Published by Paolo on 08/02/2024

I am at Gamesforum, a conference on the marketing of games. Organizers gave me a free ticket and I have to say that is worth every single (and inexistent) penny.

The times are challenging for employees. We are seeing many layoffs, changes imposed by platform holders, and global insecurity. I met colleagues and I noticed that those who work as independent are younger than those who are working as employees. It’s crazy, right?

  • If you are on a successful project, it’s very hard to grow more and more. So the day job is gritty and the pressure is very high.
  • If you are on an unsuccessful project chances that you will be fired are high
  • If you are an underdog, there are lots of opportunities to grow! Many skilled professionals are available. Many known tactics for zero-to-one growth and you can probably create realistic plans.

What does it mean to be an underdog?

There are many acceptations to the term underdog, but to me it means:

  • small scopes, budget, team
  • ideas more focused on USP, both for product and for marketing
  • zero-to-one, still few partners/peers/providers
  • focus on the build, money will be a consequence

Why is it time for the underdogs?

Big players in the market are lost in the age of efficiency. After chasing impossible growth, they are now all-in for profit. They are reviving legacy products, and creating copycats, and they are not building anything new. Being an underdog now means being forced to think of alternatives to production and distribution strategies. It means to dream more and probably better. Who knows, maybe you will be the leader of the future!

Designing Journeys

Published by Paolo on 07/02/2024

I am designing the journey of a game for a client these days. It is a fun activity, also when you don’t have all the information you need to complete it. Anyway, it can be struggling, because it is very critical for the entire project.

A journey is the prediction of how the Players should behave in the game. At the same time, a journey imagines what the game offers to the Players, according to each stage they are in. When the journey is extremely detailed, usually you have a game with less freedom. The possibility space leaves fewer choices for the Players. When the journey is just sketched, you may oversee things too much.

General rules for journeys

  • Draft your journeys on a spreadsheet
  • The first column (or one of the first columns) should always be regarding the time
  • There should be some feature to represent the stage of the Players inside of the game. In many games it is level
  • You can briefly describe what the Players should do and the narrative around it given by the game
  • Each step should have its goals
  • Each goal should be reached using at least a single mechanic, or a combination of mechanics (skill atom). The key here is to always teach something. Remember: to have fun is to learn
  • You can define the challenges that the players will find over the journeys
  • Reaching each goal (every line/step of the journey) should unlock something meaningful for the next steps of the journey

It is hard to imagine exactly how the whole game should go. Especially with big games. Journeys are usually iterative, at the project start you have less definition and more questions. You can add those questions in a separate column. It is not necessary to balance at this stage, keep it clean and balance later. The last thing, journeys are very much needed also for simple puzzle games. In that case, we talk of the beat chart more than the journey.

Skill-based puzzle games

Published by Paolo on 19/01/2024

Once there was Bejeweled Blitz! dominating the charts of free puzzle games. But then Candy Crush Saga brought many interesting changes that appealed to a broader audience. And you need that if you want to be profitable and scalable.

Still, when the business people see something that doesn’t work, the game designer sees an opportunity. And to me, there is an opportunity in skill-based puzzle games. Games where the rules impose the norm of not thinking too much. Tetris was maybe the first successful example. And it’s still there.

There is this game pretty popular online called Watermelon Game. It’s very simple and gives lots of space for the Players to think. Maybe a skill-based version of that would work? Like a Bejeweled Blitz! but with a merge mechanic.

I’m writing this in case someone does it and has success. It’s always good to feel “I said it!”.

UI driven skinner boxes

Published by Paolo on 17/01/2024

Skinner boxes are artifacts where the user taps a button in the hope of getting something. In the original ones, the user was a lab rat willing for food. In Monopoly GO! the user is a Player looking for dopamine rushes.

Skinner boxes work very well, because of two factors. The first is the variable ratio variable schedule rewards. It means that the user doesn’t know if and when the reward will arrive. The other factor is that they are simple to use. That means that also a lab rat can do that.

There are many ethical questions around Skinner boxes, but humans can choose to play a game or not. The lab rats, instead, have no choice. Of course, we can consider the addiction to dopamine a form of slavery, there are no easy answers.

In games, Skinner boxes are often associated with a series of tasks to perform. Usually, the UI leads the Players on what to do next, so they don’t have to worry. They can continue to follow the series on their television set or the class while playing the game. Their dopamine system will stay stimulated and it will feel pleasing.

A sit at the table

Published by Paolo on 16/01/2024

Companies hire game designers (and other profiles) to build their business. Game designers have a specific focus on features and content. When we design features, the best way of showing their value is to focus on the benefits of that feature.

  • Business leaders love to hear about the impact of a certain feature, more than the quality of it.
  • It’s better to speak about the benefits of reducing cognitive load instead of selling a “cleaner” design.
  • One of the goals of feature design is to improve the long-term profit, more than improving the gameplay.
  • Things like accessibility, inclusivity, and so on are useful to reach untapped markets. They are not just a good thing to do.
  • Managers love to hear how to improve the path to purchase, more than vague concepts like flow.

If more designers take this approach, we will see less of them switching to Product Manager roles just to get a sit at the table.

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is dead

Published by Paolo on 04/01/2024

Long live King Kardashian: Hollywood.

I remember this game took people like me in crisis. We read a lot of breakdowns to try to understand why this game was so successful at the time. Almost nobody understood the real value of that “exposed gem”.

The system was very simple and the economy was pretty aggressive. Only whales, VIP players, were treated with actual respect and that fit great into the game’s metaphor. Of course, for someone like me with my gaming background (as a Player) all of that looked like garbage. But hey, lots of people prove me wrong. People wanted to be entertained by that sort of point and click dating simulator with dolls mechanics.

There was a perfect marriage among a dominant mimicry and an alea. You performed actions using energy and in change you could get some special perk. Fantasy, narrative and expression were the main aesthetics.

We all learned a lot from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. So that at the end it will pass to the game history, somehow. That shitty game!

Future: remove uninteresting choices

Published by Paolo on 27/12/2023

An experiment I ran this year was TikTok. I made an account and started recording videos in Italian on game design. In a few days, I was completely sucked into the platform. I stopped playing my games for pleasure, TikTok was my unique source of mobile entertainment. I uninstalled that crazy demon from my smartphone.

The algorithm works just great, understands where I stay the most and keeps serving me what it considers to be the best. There were no surprises, every time I needed some fast stress relief I got it.

From a game design standpoint, the lack of uninteresting choices is a great thing when I am the consumer. This doesn’t happen when I run a social casino suite or a mobile RPG. Lately, it has not happened with Roblox and Fortnite either. It doesn’t happen with Steam.

I run these games and I have to choose: which game mode, minigame, or experience, do I want to play? Rarely did I decide this before running a game. So I spend 10 precious minutes deciding.

And in that context, this decision is not meaningful at all! I want to have fun and make meaningful choices in the game. Not on the main screen.

I am completely sure that the next mobile hit will understand this concept and serve the Players with straight gameplay, according to their tastes. With the possibility of swiping them away. And of course, leveraging content creation. 

Factors, scope and popularity

Published by Paolo on 22/12/2023

Every game plays around 3 factors: skill, luck, and stats.

  • The first is the actual cognitive effort required to play it.
  • Luck is about everything generated at runtime, developers set up rules for generation.
  • Stats are carefully designed values that give the Players the first goal: grow them.

There are skill-based, luck-based, and stat-based games. Games whose principal factor is one of the 3. Within this game is possible to add more of the other 2 factors. You may earn more opportunities, for instance for monetization. On the other hand, you complicate a little the things. This translates usually to a more niche game.

What’s the key to creativity? The capacity of scoping things, removing the superfluous. Many successful games started with this concept in mind. Eventually, they evolved more complicated as their popularity grew. Some of the new Players will resist a little bit of friction to be part of the crowd, to not be left out. It’s important to see where they started if you desire to replicate their success.

Game design is not fortune telling

Published by Paolo on 18/12/2023

One of the mantras of game design is that you should be able to predict the future, somehow. This is something that I read a lot, but that is plain wrong in my humble opinion.

You cannot predict the future. You should read and analyze your audience and try to understand how to bring meaning to them in a novel way. It’s not about prediction, game design is a practical craft. It’s empathetic, it’s about the present (and why not? also the past).

Leave predictions and forecasts to consultants, focus on creation instead.

PRO TIP: creativity is about cutting off things, not add more stuff.