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Tag: insight

Job in games royal rumble

Published by Paolo on 01/04/2024

My LinkedIn feed is filled with people that lost their jobs and are asking for new opportunities. I am talking about, mostly, experienced people. People who worked on games I only dream at night. People much more experienced than the average.

All of these people will send resumes. Eventually, they will be contacted for a first screening. Then they will receive a technical test. Maybe they will have another interview with the hiring manager. And then the team. Sometimes, the CEO herself.

The next months will be a royal rumble and the best talents will face the odds. I feel that is smarter to think laterally, and avoid the battle completely.

The artistic science of game design

Published by Paolo on 29/03/2024

Yesterday I had an online discussion with a fellow designer that is following a trend. The trend is to think in game design as a mere science. Like you can be able to exactly structure and predict everything by using the right approach right from the start.

I listen to everyone and I respect this colleague, but to me great games are never made like this. Game design is not science, also if it uses a pseudo-scientist approach for some of its activities. Make an hypothesis and run experiments. But then, the theory (of fun) you get is constantly challenged by innovations.

To me, instead of make prediction, the best way to fix retention is to see back. To see what you did. You do this by:

  • Playtesting your game every day on your own, every week with your team, and at least every milestone with common people
  • Measure your results and work to improve them, without worrying too much about estimation
  • Learning from your mistakes, you will make a lot of them

This is how I educated myself as a game designer. Game design has also something in common with art, in the sense that you need to develop your taste, your craft and most importantly, your process.

Happy Easter, everybody!

Zombie Lane: my initiation to free-to-play

Published by Paolo on 26/03/2024

These days I feel nostalgic. I was thinking about which game caught my interest for f2p games. In my case, it was a game called Zombie Lane for Facebook.

It was the early times of free-to-play, and the success of Farmville was already there. I was receiving everyday notifications to help my friends with their crops. This game looked like a satire of that fashion, in my eyes. I discovered it thanks to Marc, a colleague from Zitro. And the irony is that a few times later I ended up working for the company that developed that game, Digital Chocolate.

The core loop is quite simple:

  • You get a set of tasks to complete to advance throughout the story
  • Completing a task means using energies to perform certain actions which include: harvesting, building, crafting, and zombie elimination.
  • Every time you use energy to perform some action, you get XP to level up. Leveling up grants improving your maximum energies to be able to perform more and more.
  • When you complete a task, you unlock 1+ extra tasks and characters

The long-term goal is to complete the storyline, which is organized into tasks. You also have to design and maintain your place, as a mid-term goal. You need defending it from the zombies. When you are out of the game, zombies can destroy things.

The adventure-farm genre is really interesting because it involves economy and systems but also an intense dose of narrative. Zombie Lane had barks, dialogues, stories, animations, and enemies with meaning. It was a simple game, and I have a tremendous respect for that game.

Maybe now that Discord launched activities: the possibility of making games for its vocal, it would be cool to recreate a game like zombie-lane. Many Discord users of today were the Zombie Lane players of yesterday.

Fun fact, the game already had many mechanics (especially resources) that are still widely used today in video games. Another innovation could be to thing in other kind of currencies.

Image taken from here.

Four alternatives to job interviews

Published by Paolo on 22/03/2024

The other day I made a post on my LinkedIn right after posting about the same thing here on my blog. Happens many times that the second post is better than the first one. Reactions are good and I had interesting conversations with people because of that.

If you are looking for a job and you ask any expert, the things they would say you will include:

  • Apply to job offers and get interviews
  • Become a specialist in a field
  • Show up, show up, show up!

This is the playbook, the standard thing. This process will put you in the game of people looking for the “top talent”. The best of the best. I was reading a post boasting that a job they were offering had already more than 300 applications from veterans from top companies. Horrible thing, what are you waiting for? Is that a selection process or a battle royale?

Today I want to propose 4 alternative ways of getting yourself through. No one of them is easy, or evident.

  1. Offer something unique. Something you know that only you and a few people like you can offer. To do that, you should work a lot on understanding what you can offer.
  2. Have people that follow your steps. People that when you are there they are beside you. Start a community around something.
  3. Be famous for something. This is probably the least easy solution.
  4. The easier: become everything you miss to make the job you want to do. Do you want to be a game designer? Become a producer, a marketer, and a programmer too. Make your things become an entire company (with very small projects) and put them out there.

Either of these four things is better than spending hours every week making interviews and assignments that, believe me, rarely bring you to land a job.

Be a gatekeeper

Published by Paolo on 21/03/2024

Back in the days, when video games starting to be a business, gatekeepers were physical locations (the arcades). You reached your friends there and you played what was present based on the distribution in that area.

Then the console era started, and the shops became the gatekeepers. They decided to put a game more or less visible on the shelves.

Today is extremely easy to develop and put a game out there, there is no friction for that. Also, it’s getting harder and harder to get the attention of the people. The friction imposed by technological limitations was helpful for the few brave enough to decide making video games.

Today, everyone can be a game developer. Also modding has become easier and you can earn solid money with that. Look at the last news from Epic on UEFN, for instance. There is no friction anymore, so where is the secret of going forward?

Tech today lets us become gatekeepers of our own content. We need to find ways of finding and serving very well our audience. It can be small, but it should be happy and engaged. That’s where the secret lies for the companies of the future.

First Playtest for The Dark Zone

Published by Paolo on 05/03/2024

After a couple of days working on my first map and getting confidence with UEFN, I have a first version of The Dark Zone, a classic Quake deathmatch map to test.

I want to test specifically three things:

  • The dimensions: I had to scale the map up because of many reasons. Usually, in Fortnite, there are more players. Also, I want to express a sense of reverence towards the classics of the genre. Plus, the metrics of Fortnite permit the Players to move more agile across a map. Players can slide, run, crouch, and many things more.
  • The lights: the standard lighting system for Fortnite is very plain, but also better in terms of contrast. Still, I want to represent the darkness of these classics but at the same time make the visuals always readable.
  • Weapons: Fortnite has too many mechanics and weapons, and I have to convert somehow the weapons from Quake to a Fortnite counterpart. That can lead to a lot of balancing issues. I need to test it.

Talent and Effort

Published by Paolo on 01/03/2024

Talent is something that you have or you don’t. You can cultivate it or ignore it. You can also never discover your talent in your whole life. You can work on something, play with something, or make something without any talent. If you do anything with talent, everyone notices it.

Effort is a choice. If you don’t put effort into something it’s because you don’t want to. The context can influence the effort you put into something. You can also measure the effort and its results.

Four scenarios:

  1. You have talent and you choose to put effort into something. Best case scenario, you are the Nick Cave of what you do. Or the Maradona. Whatever you prefer.
  2. You have a talent for something, but you don’t put effort into it. You will never discover what you’re capable of. You can live with that, no worries.
  3. You don’t have talent but you want to do something. You put the effort in. The majority of successful professionals are like that. The important thing is to be aware of that and stay humble. Also, respect (and steal) talents when you spot them, which is not always easy.
  4. You don’t have talent and you don’t want to put any effort. This is a significant portion of people living in this World, as far as I perceive. In the case of creativity (art, writing, design, engineering, science, faith) an impressive business is building for them: generative AI.

Unprofessionalism

Published by Paolo on 29/02/2024

The recent news in the games industry comes with a bunch of social actions that are unprofessional. In this post, I would like to point those out (without saying names, of course).

The first thing is using bad words and cursing while posting about something. It doesn’t make you feel smarter, also if your content can be more viral. Believe me.

The second behavior is to speak regarding something you don’t know. “Company X laid off YYYY people, shame on you!”. Why are you doing that? Do you really know why it happened? No, you don’t.

The third issue is with people sharing WIP projects on social. Finish things, and show what you are proud of. It’s OK to share that you are working on something if you are looking for help, but it’s not OK to show something incomplete hoping that someone will hire you.

Last thing, we all like humor and cynicism but if you are constantly posting just that you are not putting yourself in a good light. You can look smart and experienced at the start, but then it’s tiring.

Do this instead

  • Try to evolve your communication style and channels
  • Analyze what you post and the results you have
  • Speak always politely, be always gentle

(I wish I could follow these things myself. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible because of the context and design of certain platforms)

Is the games industry even a thing?

Published by Paolo on 28/02/2024

Over the past six months or so, the very concept of “making a career in the video game industry” has completely evaporated from my mind.

There is no industry, because there are no guarantees or responsibilities. Whoever breaks it (for example by bargaining much more than you should) doesn’t pay. Indeed, the annual bonus is guaranteed by adjusting numbers on an Excel. Most often, numbers represent people.

The famous “industry” is nothing more than a mass of people who don’t even play video games and who create companies essentially to sell them. In the renowned “industry”, video games are almost an accident, they are not the important thing.

People who dream of video games, who study, who work their asses off, are tossed left and right like cattle. In the illusion of being able to create experiences that make other people dream. I understood this many years ago, thank God.

But it’s just an illusion, it doesn’t exist. The best thing is to do it in your small way and create your opportunities. Much safer, even if it doesn’t seem like it at first glance.

Emergency is the future

Published by Paolo on 22/02/2024

The future of games is not made of new venues to cover. With mobile phones, we covered everything. I had my students playing games while I was explaining something important for their future. Who never?

It is not made of new spending habits. Even if the crypto-bros are right, even if the people will pay for games and things to trade in bitcoins (that will never happen), this will not determine a new era. Because the future of games will be related to the gameplay itself.

The future of games will be not putting monitors closer to our eyes hoping for more engagement. VR is causing headaches, people have been trying to sell that thing for 40 years. Steve Jobs would have never produced a dive mask to go on the streets, I am sure.

So where is the future of games? Well, I don’t know. What I do know is that is always an iteration of something we already have. For instance, the f2p mobile games era (which we can say was revolutionary) was built on top of the Java apps for cellphones, promoted by NOKIA in the Nordics, mainly.

If we look at games that are successful right now, they all offer some level of emergent gameplay. Look at FPS, survival, and horror out there. Look at the top games, the ones that make billions. They all permit a certain level of things you can do if we think laterally about the mechanics. And that unleashes a series of videos and things that people enjoy.

When you think of making a game for streamers, think mainly about emergencies. Do the same when you think of a game for TikTokers. It has always been like that: people want to find in video games something different from real life. Something they cannot do. A playful space to explore. That is where the future of games lies, I am sure.