Skip to content

Tag: insight

Prepare your portfolio!

Published by Paolo on 17/08/2022

Hello people, I am back from my well deserved vacations ready for a new year full of content for free for you! Hope you all did enjoyed a nice vacations with your families and your best people.

The other day an ex student of mine made a question in a WhatsApp channel we are both in: “Can someone recommend where to create a game design porfolio?”

There is no specialized website, as far as I know, to create a portfolio. That is bad, because of discoverability, but is good because forces us designers in thinking out of the box and not using templates and pre-defined layouts.

I personally use itch.io, also if there are a whole lot of things that I cannot put on my portfolio because they belong to specific companies where I signed NDAs. That’s the eternal issue of our job.

Study your target

When you prepare your portfolio, you should think in WHO will read it. Will it be an HR manager? Maybe a lead game designer? Or a CEO? Every people speaks differently and every company does so, too.

  • Look at companies you would like to work for
  • Look at their game designers and try to find their portfolios (you can also ask them on LinkedIn)
  • Create your porfolio using well your references

At the end of the day doing a portfolio is a for of design!

What to put in a portfolio

As I said before, I think there is NOT a general rule, a template, a standard, a best practice. You should find your way and make your own talents shine!

I can tell you what I would put:

  • Start with a video gameplay with most meaningful moment of each exercise/job. People don’t want to have to download anything to see what you did.
  • Add some capture with very special moments, most memorable moments.
  • Notes on what you learn and on your process. You can use the STARR method that is also used by some recruiter.
  • Link to external documents and references. I use Google Drive for that!

FTUE, tutorial, onboarding

Published by Paolo on 22/07/2022

The first time user experience, or FTUE, is a mandatory thing to design for every videogame. Your players are going to have their first time experience, that’s for sure. So that if you leave that to the faith, that first experience will be completely random. For free to play, first time experience is made of tutorial and onboarding.

The tutorial is usually between 3 and 15 minutes and, step by step, all the most important features of the game are revealed to the Players. In order to design the best tutorial, you should look deeply at the theme of your game and at what are you proud of. If we analyze successful games like RAID: Shadow Legends and Dislyte, we notice that the first one puts all the value in the beautiful heroes you can unlock with gachas. The latter, instead, is very proud of its lore. They both work, the important thing is to really understand all kind of players you may want to serve and like them. If you really like your players, I mean as persons, you will definitely design the best tutorial for them.

The onboarding is usually made by the first 2-5 sessions and it’s the stage in which engaged players will fall in love literally with your game. The Players will discover all the systems of your games, and unlock the first things. They will feel they can grow if they stay with you. In order to design the best onboardings, you should focus on the Players’ motivations and try to bring them values around that.

Things don’t work from the very first iterations, so it’s better to make small iterations and improve step by step your tutorial first and your onboarding second.

Remote processes

Published by Paolo on 18/07/2022

I work remotely for companies since 2016, more or less. I am very specialized in game economies and UX, so that for them is easy to deal with my tasks and responsibilities.

Game development, instead, is never so easy. You cannot rely just on freelancers to build successful products that potentially may last years. You need a core team fully involved every day. And in order to keep it working properly, you need to set up the proper processes. Also the companies that state that they don’t believe in processes, end up setting up (scrappy) processes in the end. To me, it is better to embrace the process as part of the development. In my opinion, processes are very important.

In 2020 everything shifted online. Remote work was forced by the terrible situation of the pandemic. We had no time to prepare, we had to act fast. In a lot of cases, the same exact process employed before was translated to the asynchronous remote work. Some of the most “boring” things were also eliminated. In their place, nothing new was developed. The new process, then, was like Frankenstein.

Nowadays, many are arguing that we need to return to the office because is not the same online. They are right, online is not the same. But, are you sure you did your job, testing and iterating alternative processes?

The reality of giving games for free

Published by Paolo on 15/07/2022

You start a new project with your team, and you read that someone is getting rich with a f2p mobile game. There are people, called whales, that are willing to spend thousands of euros each month. You can be rich too! You have a great idea!

Then you find the right investors and you build your team. You study the market well, mitigate all risks and put your product in soft launch, after 2 years of development. Then you struggle with metrics. Day one, day seven, day thirty retention. Average revenue per user, lifetime value.

You spend two years more in development. Investors want to see their return on investment. Your team is tired, many of the original members are gone. And you fail.

Was you a disaster? No, you are just the regular situation. Read here:

Link to the original post

I asked to this expert how to prove your KPIs potential early. He answered me that:

And I tell you: it is NOT easy all of that. First of all because when you are under pressure is super hard to admit that your KPIs are not promising to the investors. You need talented people, and that’s pretty uncommon.

Many of us feel that F2P is dominated by white collar people full of money and addicted “users” that cannot stop play. The reality is super different. The reality is that 99.71% of projects fail. That’s the regular situation.

Play the build

Published by Paolo on 12/07/2022

Game designers play the build. Everyday. At least for a couple of minutes. Then we play other builds too, during our working day.

And then maybe we play again the build. Just to check out all the differences.

Someday this rule is not respected. Sometimes those days are many. Sometimes are in the row.

And when this happens there is the possibility that the game is not so engaging to you, anymore. Ask yourself if it’s time to move on.

King is reviving Twisted Metal

Published by Paolo on 07/07/2022

Latest announcement by King is a branding campaing dressed as call for playtest.

I mean, how cool is that? I really believe that Twisted Metal had to be revived somehow. And it seems that now there is a good opportunity for that.

The visual promise has high quality. The question as always will be “will my phone support that?”. I still remember the 15 GB of Diablo Immortal, that I had to uninstall immediately sadly.

The game will be PvP, so that I guess the main monetization driver will be cosmetics and seasons. I love PvP games, I believe that there are huge opportunities there. I also believe that nowadays you cannot afford to develop a pvp game only for mobile phone.

Nowadays there is the game. And the game should be accessible from everywhere. So that I am waiting for PC and Console versions. I am an old gamer, so that I hate virtual pads!

Why I believe that this will probably work?

  • I believe that multiplayer competitive games (if well made, of course) are the ones with the best retention
  • I believe that King has contacts with the gatekeepers (Apple and Google) and can easily be featured on their stores
  • I believe a game like this is really loved internally. And when the teams love something, that something has more success chances.

Smallest possible audience

Published by Paolo on 06/07/2022

I join a new company as a game designer and the first thing I get in the meeting with my manager. She says “our next game will be for everyone”. I start worry seriously.

Why? Because especially with this state of the market it is way better to target the smallest possible audience and make them happy. Build a great game for a few people, and those few people will recommend your game to their friends.

If you manage to create a small community of people really willing to pay for your game and play it, then step by step you can grow your community.

When you make a game for everyone you will never know who is really playing the game.

  • Will he be a 40 years old lawyer in his bathroom?
  • Will she be a 12 years old schoolgirl?

Everyone will be possibly in your game. The success of your design and development will be strictly dependant from the performance marketing. Specifically from its capability of bringing into your game a lot of people cheaply. Most of them will churn out, someone will stay. A team of data scientist will study all the data generated by those people. If things work out, then, your game will be updated with new features from other similar games. You will test those game modes against hypothesis made by your product manager and you.

Can you foresee what’s involved in here? A huge structure. It is great when you are a big player, but if you are a small company this can lead you to disaster.

When you focus on serving the smallest possible audience, instead, you are taking a hard but affordable challenge. You still should rely on data and information, but you will have the privilege of adding qualitative insight on top of all that.

Final thought: hardcore players can play casual games. Casual players will almost never play hardcore games. If you want to build the best small viable audience, find and serve the hardcores.

AI and sentient NPCs

Published by Paolo on 04/07/2022

The other day I was reading an excerpt from the interview ran at Google with LaMDA. You can read the interview here.

What I see here is a piece of software capable of speaking about itself. And it speaks of itself like a real and believable human being. When I think in applications for videogames, I think in the hours spent in writing NPC dialogues for RPG, adventure and strategy games.

Will the NPC of the future be more realistic thanks to AI? That is a real possibility, to me. Imagine to:

  • Define the traits of your NPC
  • Assigning them context variables (world, mood, events)
  • Click the magic button and in a few time being able having a conversation with them.

The only way of making good games

Published by Paolo on 14/06/2022

I have learnt this the hard way. Often, people like to make experiments. They hire people like me as freelancer and then they hire juniors fulltime. They want results, good results in possibly a short time. Then our collaboration ends, experiment failed.

Why is that? Because people hardly accepts the reality of games. Making games is a serious thing. You will never make a good game with people part time. You can use part time freelancers, like me, to create specific content for something that already works. But if you want to make a new game you need to really invest heavily time and energies in doing it. 100%. There is no shortcut.

I always speak this clear before with my clients “this is hard, it will hardly succeed. I cannot dedicate more than X hours per week. You need more.”. Nothing. They want always to try. And sometimes they get upset because of the results.

Don’t be upset, I tried to warn you.

The term I most hate: User

Published by Paolo on 10/06/2022

The other day I was listening to a video where the speakers named the terms they most hate to hear. One speaker said he hates “web3”. The other “I hate metaverse”, and so on.

The term I absolutely hate the most (well, hate is a strong word isn’t it?) is: User.

To me there are the People. When the People start to play your game, those become Players. Players may become also Clients in free-to-play, if they decide to invest some money. And some of them become a Fan.

Players, Clients, Fans. Those people deserve their degree of respect. Users is a bad term, reminds me the abuse of illegal substances. I hate to say “Users”. Yet, I say it a lot because is very common used.