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Tag: insight

Lemme show how AI can… STOP IT!

Published by Paolo on 01/10/2024

Yesterday a guy in a Slack channel sent the link to his post, shilling that he was showing the true potential of generative AI. The post is this one. Let’s break it down as a simple example of why all this hype is damaging the collective mind and how easy is to trick a brain using the right wording.

Preparation

Claim: “15min with just using GPT-4o and GPT-1o to create a complete game idea & concept“

This guy is looking for something quick and fast, not just getting ideas. He wants a complete concept. I consider myself a fast professional, I like quick and dirty things more than slow and perfect stuff. But 15 minutes is ultra-fast. Creating a complete game concept takes a huge portion of my mind, especially my conscience. How can a chipset have a conscience? Come on.

Prompt: “I want you be my my Lead Game Designer who knows all about mobile gaming, all genres, all mechanics, market trends etc I want you to come up with a compelling idea with USPs. I want you to pick the genre and sub-genre for me based on market data, some where that has high potential and is sorta blue ocean and high chance of success. The idea should be mobile friendly with simple mechanics and at the same time good depth so at first players can easily pass and progress but soon they have improve their skills/characters or whatever in order to progress further“

This man’s role to the machine is “his” lead game designer. This is a pretty common fetiche among game leaders. “My game designer”, “my programmer”. Some people believe that teammates are like pets or something.

The expectation is that this virtual pet knows all about mobile gaming too. That’s the dream, really! You take a selection process anywhere and you can feel that. Now, the good thing is that the machine is connected to the internet so it has access to lots of data. But, does that mean that the machine “knows”? Can the machine actually understand what it’s reading? I don’t think so.

The task given is not well defined, and too generic too. Lots of “sorta” and “whatever”. This happens also in real life, that’s one of the challenges of my profession. And don’t misinterpret me, I love it! It’s part of the beauty of my job to understand what people actually want.

Game concept and generated ideas

– Title: Eden Rising: Rebuild & Survive
– Genre: Hybrid-Casual City Builder with Survival Elements
– Setting: A post-apocalyptic world where players lead a group of survivors to rebuild society

Mechanics Overview
– Resource Management: Start by collecting basic resources (wood, stone, food) through simple taps. As the game progresses, automate resource collection and manage supply chains.
– Building and Upgrading: Construct homes, farms, workshops, and defenses. Upgrading buildings unlocks new functionalities and improves efficiency.
– Survivor Management: Assign survivors to roles based on their skills. Manage their well-being by providing shelter, food, and security.
– Dynamic Events: Random events like storms, raids, or resource booms that require quick decision-making and adaptation.
– Exploration Missions: Send teams to explore ruins, forests, or other settlements. These missions can yield rare resources, new survivors, or story developments.

Why This Game Will Succeed
– High Engagement Potential: The blend of simple mechanics with deep strategy caters to a broad audience, encouraging both casual and dedicated play.
– Market Gap: The unique combination of genres fills a niche with little direct competition, positioning the game for standout success.
– Scalability: Regular updates with new content, events, and features will keep the game fresh and retain players over time.
– Social Integration: Community-building features enhance player retention through social engagement.

I don’t know where to start, honestly. If you read this and think that is good I suggest you to start studying game design for real, because you have no idea of what you’re talking about.

Game design is NOT this, at all. Game design is engaging with an audience and a team, understanding a market, and making micro-choices according to a set of problems to solve. As a game designer, you are invited to lead a process of discovery:

  • You may want to give a role to your players and see what happens
  • You can explore a mechanic or a set of mechanics
  • You may want to discover a new World that you and your team are building
  • You maybe want to set up a relationship with your players, thing that happens in live games
  • You may want to deliver a concrete experience
Miyamoto built his whole career on the concept of miniature garden

A lead game designer is a game designer who leads a team of game designers. So a lead game designer would tackle this issue very differently from the words soup you can see above.

The moodboard

Not happy with the shameful result, our friend added 4 unrelated images:

The first image is a generic and boring village in the middle of a north-European wood. You can see there is no central structure, nothing to drive the eye of the players. Just a generic composition.

The second image is a supposed sequence of upgrades of a building. In this case, it looks like a barrack that becomes a wooden house. The evolution makes the roof change orientation and each evolution is unrelated to the ones before.

The third image is a set of character concepts. Explorers from a utopic past or a dystopic future, I don’t know. Some of them have arrows but no bow, and some others just a bow. There are cool details, probably stolen from some Artstation page. Nothing special, nothing that tells a story about the game itself.

What is most important, these visuals are NOT hybrid-casual style like stated in first place by the machine.

Last but not least, The Last of Us. What does this mean in the game? Can you “conquer” this zone or explore it? And why? It’s just to remind us of TLOU, right?

Conclusions

I am tired of this shit, frankly. Look how many reactions and comments this guy had! Look at the position he covers. And you will understand why the state of games, especially mobile games, is desperate.

I went to IndieDevDay24

Published by Paolo on 30/09/2024

I was at IndieDevDay24 and I came with good insight. Only one selfie, this is me waiting for a free piñacolada.


Game development is getting faster thanks to growing technologies.

I was impressed by an overview of Construct that a nice guy gave me. You can make a prototype on the web as quickly as editing a video for TikTok.

Instant games combined with live elements can bring audience to small creators.

Another thing, you will read everywhere that tens of thousands games are published every year on Steam and that the market is overcrowded.

But then you meet people doing games for Steam and you discover that a huge portion of them made their plans on the concept of “hope”. They hope to find a publisher, hope to finish the project, and hope it will work.

Hope is not a good strategy. I get the beauty of tackling game development as a liberal discipline, without servile constraint. And I love it, but you should make a discerned choice.

Speaking of which, the best emotion for me is to meet former students. They always call me loudly, they make me sit and play their games. They take notes on my comments. I love to teach, also if there is a bureaucratic wall around teaching that pushes me away from it. But I always try to come back in some way.

You can control your development time and your budget. You can design good games around that. Game design is removing things!

Tens of thousands publish every year on Steam, but few take care of these things.

There is still much space for indie games, market saturation is just a Chimera.

3%

Published by Paolo on 13/09/2024

To understand the situation in which we are in the video game industry, I propose to make a parallel with the downfall of rock music.

  • In the late 90s, in the USA, a legislative change allowed large corporations to decide on radio programming.
  • After years of glory and the climax of Nirvana’s “Nevermind”, music production became homogeneous because a few influential producers controlled the sound.
  • Managers began to exploit budgets to their advantage, driving costs skyrocketing and leaving very little to the artists.
  • Napster arrived and music consumption changed radically. The greatest impact was on record sales.
  • The collective experience of enjoying music diminished, given the little appeal of the bands in circulation. Everyone wanted to produce predictable and already-heard sounds, like those of Nickelback.

Consolidation led to a loss of diversity and originality in rock music. Barriers were created for capable artists by producers interested in the short term. The arrival of Napster led to fewer record sales and also to more isolation in listening to music. Before you went to the store to chat, now you were alone casually looking for something to listen. The experience of listening to rock became fleeting and fragmented.

Today new platforms allow rock artists to find and cultivate their audience. This suggests the potential for a new era of creativity, which will probably not reach the ancient glories.

I want to leave every parallelism open to your interpretation today.

Mine is certainly too biased.

Have a great weekend!

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.

My doubts on current leaders

Published by Paolo on 11/09/2024

The ex-president of SONY Computer Entertainment Europe, Chris Deering declared on a podcast that “if money isn’t coming in from consumers on the last game, it’s going to be hard justifying spending money for the next.”

And I agree with that. But after watching the presentation of PS5 PRO yesterday, featuring games as old as The Last of Us 2 (2020, 4 years old) to show the power of a brand new thing I have serious doubts about this kind of leadership.

Yeah, ok, he WAS a president. Still, he has influence somehow.

A team’s ability to create hit games improves over time. The more a team works together, the higher the chances they will make something better. I have 2 questions:

  • If you hire and fire that easily, how can you hope to get better games over time?
  • If you have worse games how will you sell more expensive consoles?

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.

Strong niche

Published by Paolo on 05/09/2024

There is something in common among Minecraft, Fortnite, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Helldivers 2. They all started from a strong niche.

  • Minecraft was a solo project of a developer willing to make something alone. Notch then found his niche thanks to YouTube.
  • Fortnite started like a PvE project in an internal game jam. Something small that found the first formula with the niche that liked both games like Minecraft and shooters.
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 is the 3rd episode of a game created by a company founded by 2 doctors, willing to make something for the niche of D&D role players.
  • Helldivers 2 is the second episode of Helldivers, a shooter with few mechanics very popular among a small niche.

Finding a strong niche is the first step to massive success. Always. That’s also why publishers are investing so heavily in remakes. Remakes are reworks on something that found a niche, they are more probably be interesting for a wider audience.

How do you know if you found a strong niche? There are many ways, in F2P you should measure the % of regulars, people that come play the game every single day. That’s the best indicator that the niche you found is truly interested in the game.

They should give the game for free

Published by Paolo on 04/09/2024

Wicked problems have nuances. How to get people’s attention and understand their motivation to play a certain game.

“The market is oversaturated“, yet I don’t have new games that I am hyped for right now… So the market is saturated for who, specifically?

Creating good free-to-play games means having a game with the biggest spend depth possible. Or that the game is so massive that sustains itself on (truly) micro-transactions. You either make a Witheout Survival or a Candy Crush Saga.

The latter is complicated nowadays because people learn and the market evolves. What had value before is not the same as today. People discovering casual games on a Facebook invitation are not the same as people who decide to install a game after watching a YouTube interstitial today.

That is why modern casual games (that work) rely a lot on ads. Their business is with ad networks, more than players’ wallets. And that is a complicated and also shady business, are you sure that your team is ready for that?

As I said, on the other end we have games with a big spend depth. These games are much more deep and complicated. They manage to create a gamified society, by pushing for regulars: players that play every single day. That’s the single most important KPI of all, if you ask me. In that case, and only in that case, the wealthier cohorts decide to spend high. And that makes your business grow for real.

Making free-to-play games is like making luxury goods. You should aim to the rich, if you want to have more chances. And to do that, you need a strong service.

When we give something for free, time becomes the currency with which people decide. It’s not just “give them for free, otherwise, they will not come“. If you are already thinking like that, you are on the wrong track: you are not believing in your own game.

You need to build something that makes you think “This is an incredibly amazing game, people will play this every day!“. And then, if you’re lucky, you will have a TOP Grossing game with high concurrency.

Market shifts when we move, not when we pay for it to move

Published by Paolo on 02/09/2024

I am an avid listener and consumer of information on the business I love. I like to hear about market trends, data, and insight. It’s not a matter of knowing which trend to follow. I like to learn more about how the market reacts to our craft.

The issue with that is that majority of this content comes from consultants and managers. They pretend to quantify everything, and it doesn’t work like that.

Market trends influence the industry and investments because those act when informed on this data. But data cannot measure intangible things such as cognition and emotion.

Creativity evades quantification. Business people want certainty: I put X and then I will get Y.

It’s what we put out there that shapes the market. We design games for an audience, and we shouldn’t decide to read the previous spending choices for that audience. We should instead focus on what they were looking for, in exchange for their money. Our job is to read something intangible, but existent.

  • If millions of players play daily a specific game in a genre it doesn’t mean there is an actual market around that genre. They will most likely continue to play that game in that area. And they are looking for another kind of experience to complement the one they get from that game.
  • Also, mobile games have shifted in the last decade from the first long-term minded business based on brand (Rovio, King, Supercell) to the last short-term performance marketing companies (MiHoYo, Voodoo, Playrix). And the results are out there, few winners of the race to the bottom.

That’s where the art of game design truly helps. Too many times our business is led by people who prefer to make something bad but controllable instead of something good but not controllable.

And to make something spectacular, you should focus on making something good in first place.