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Tag: inspiration

How to self-educate in designing games

Published by Paolo on 16/12/2021

Improve your design abilities adapting this writing method by Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin was born poor and he stopped being educated when he was 10 years old. He developed a method of self-education and became great at writing informative texts. Here there is his method:

“I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.”

Can this be adapted to game design?

Try this:

  1. Find good videogames and make hints of every interesting part you see. Start from the brickfile.
  2. Wait for a few days and then come back to the hints. Who is the target of this game?
  3. Try to reconstruct the features and mechanics that you can reconstruct. Focus on the simple things, don’t overcomplicate it.
  4. Wait again for a few days and then come back. Does that make sense? Is the audience the same again or you are looking for other kind of Players?
  5. Repeat 3 and 4 until you are happy with your result
  6. Prototype just the things you improved!

An honest and personal post about how I became a professional game designer

Published by Paolo on 07/12/2021

If you want to get a job as a game designer do the job, don’t look for it. You have to be already working as a game designer if you want to hope to being paid for that.

I remember when I was compulsively looking for a job sending resumes. Poor me.

“I sent 5 resumes today, I have done my job.”. That was my comfort zone.

Some job offer put “having participated in at least 5 projects from start to end”. Some other was more intrepid: “having participated in the complete development of a TOP250 grossing game”. The good old days of 2013!

Do the job everyday

I started, every single morning, waking up early. Having my shower and breakfast. Dressing up with my best clothes, putting my shoes and my clock on. Working all the day at my desk, at least 8 hour per day. Imagining I was going to my office. I discovered the superpowers that “faking it” enable. I started studying seriously from books at night before of going to bed.

I maintained a document with all the job offers and companies here in Barcelona. I studied their games and imagined to work on those. In fact, those games had already their players and their competitors.

Deconstruct games

Deconstructing games is a process mostly mechanic at start. Start from the simple screen flow, make a brickfile. Spot their competitors and do the same. You find a feature that some competitor has and the game you are studying doesn’t? You have your design task! Use what you learnt from books and step by step build your own design framework. This is your secret, in your method there is your value.

Probably those companies you are monitoring will never hire you. They are still looking for the “best talent”. A game designer who worked on successful games. The dream, the rockstar. Nevermind, it’s YOU that want to work as game designer. They are too busy in filtering out people like you. So don’t wait for a company to let you in. Just do it.

Find your people

Try to create and maintain meaningful connections in the industry. I created a meetup, the Barcelona Game Design Meetup. My intention was to join game designers also from other companies. I ignored their strict policies most of those company had, instead. I also ignored that often people working for those companies are NOT the most motivated persons. They just do their job. They work as game designers, but often they are not intimately designers. I met a lot of wannabies and a few professionals. Making connections is still very useful. I just enjoyed any opportunity to talk about game design. Any opportunity!

Why do you design games?

Published by Paolo on 06/12/2021

The other day I was listening to a YouTube video (yeah, listening) with 2 people that I consider industry experts talking about leadership in videogames.

One of the two quoted this sentence from Orson Welles:

“…in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

His point was that, as a leader, you shouldn’t try to create a peaceful environment. In fact, great things come out from hard times.

This post is not to enter in the center of the question. In fact, those persons are people with at least five years more experience than me. And in companies with great products where I dream working someday. So that for the sake of this post they are right.

But I ask myself: what do I want to do with my job?

Do I want to become a name like Leonardo or Michelangelo? Or do I want to create something that brings fun in every place it is placed, like a cuckoo clock?

When game designers deal with artists

Published by Paolo on 05/12/2021

I have dealt with game artists everyday for many years. My background is computer science, that is why I find it challenging to understand them well. Someone said to me once “you will never understand artists” laughing at my face.

Something I know, anyways. All the people, all the time, give their opinions to the artist. I like it, why blue? Mmm I don’t know. Honestly? I would put that on the right.

You have to be efficient in talking to them. The best way I know? Describe to them what you are seeing. Use your honest and sincere words and wait for their comment on your description.

If something does not convince you, ask them questions. You are a game designer, but the game design is something the whole team will do. Also them. Do not lose the opportunity to use their brains. Facilitate the act of game design and respect their ego. Which, in some cases, can be very high.

Try this when you get stuck

Published by Paolo on 04/12/2021

When you get stuck in a creative process share your concerns as soon as possible. I advise you to do it with conviction. People react quite badly to extreme things. Propose a sudden extreme draft to your team so that their brains are activated!

I usually get stuck on the writing side. Finding a tone for a new character or for a specific moment. Finding the right words is always very complicated to me. I need time that often I don’t have.

Define a tone according with the context and circunstances. Write down lines as quickly as possible in that tone. Try to do it in an extreme way. Share it immediately with the team. If you have a week to prepare a dialogue (that never happens), imagine that you have one hour. 

Pass your draft in slack or whatever with conviction: “I’m thinking something like this”. People will start to help you with ideas and concepts, believe me. They cannot accept that extreme thing. That is why you may want to be it: to activate their brain defenses!

With this technique you will get 3-5 potential tones and various references that I can explore! The team contributed to that and they will also feel more involved with the whole thing.

I hope this trick is useful to you!

Do this after a game jam

Published by Paolo on 03/12/2021

The most common suggestion I read when people ask “how to work as a game designer?” is: participate in game jams.

In my humble opinion, this suggestion is incomplete. In fact, game jams are a cool event where you are forced to make decisions quickly and to join the ideas of all the team in something you really want to show at the end. The time you have usually is very low, so that you feel you are really pushing your boundaries. As experience is great and you can also make meaningful connections.

BUT, game jams lack a very important element for game designers: Players. The result of your hard work will probably be shared with other game developers and also the final result is often voted by devs. Nothing to do with the real struggle of game design: understanding behaviors and needs of the people that are willing to play your game.

Once your game jam weekend is over, maybe you achieved great results. End a complete experience is a great result, arriving in the first 10 positions is. The first 3 is a great result. The 1st position is awesome! And then what?

Then often you speak with your colleagues, you polish what you did and you just publish it.

Try, instead, let common people play your game. Start with your family, especially the kids if you are lucky to have them around. Look for proof that your game doesn’t work! Do not look to confirm that you had a great idea. You have to put your concept in crisis if you want to really pass to the next step: publish something meaningful.

Is designing games making art?

Published by Paolo on 01/12/2021

We hear questions like this a lot. Are games a form of art? When we create games, do we produce art?

Internet is full of discussions among great minds (and also not so great) around those questions.

Often the discourse moves to “ok, what is art?” or “right, what is a game?”.

Lately I am taking an art course: Long pose drawing and painting. It was really a discovery to see how many things game design shares with art.

Art may have a strict process to follow. You can follow a specific method to create art pieces. You can also decide to just follow your movements and what your mind says. The same exact thing happens with game design. When you work for a company, probably you may want to follow a method and adapt it to the company needs. When we are alone with our mind, instead, we can just sketch. Sometimes the magic happens. Just as in art.

Art is based on the aesthetics. Aesthetics mean the study of the essence of things. When I am drawing a person standing in front of me, I am not really drawing straight. The drawing comes out from the shadows I am able to synthetize with my charcoals. I am constantly trying to find the essence to explain what I am seeing. Same exact thing with game design. You and your team want to deliver an experience, so that the whole game design process is about finding the essence of that experience. Look at the classic MDA framework, where researchers found 8 kind of aesthetics. Someone should continue that research, actually. It was made when videogames were still artifacts. Today games are entertainment, not artifacts anymore.

Art presents a challenge to the viewer. The artists tried to explain the aesthetics of what they were seeing or thinking. The final result is presented to the World and offers always an interpretation challenge. Instead of visual art, think in music. The first musical instrument opens the melody, then maybe a drum puts the rhythm in. Then other instruments join to create the harmony. According to the listener, the music can be noisy or exciting. The music can be very complicated when the listener is not prepared. The same exact thing happens with game design, especially with UX and Level Design. The final game has a complexity which is in general based on audience tastes. Or, at least, I would prefer to be so.

We are all game designers

Published by Paolo on 26/11/2021

There are four main specializations in game design: UX Design, Narrative Design, System Design and Level Design.

Each specialization is part of the game design, which in turn is part of the design. A Narrative Designer is a game designer; is a designer. A System Designer is a designer. And so on.

The difference is in the questions that each specialization asks itself.

UX Designer: What can you do in the game? What do we care that players do? What are the business objectives? Do the business goals support those of the players? Who are our players? How are they using the game right now?

System Designer: How can the gaming experience be broken down? What are the necessary resources for the experience and how do they interact with each other? Where do we want scarcity and where do we want abundance?

Narrative Designer: Who? Where? Why? What? When? How?

Level Designer: What are the metrics? What mechanics do I have? What kind of spaces appear in the game’s magic circle? How long should the level last? With what resources does the player arrive? What resources does the player end up with?

Job offers are always more specialized. In my humble opinion, any extra specialization is a specialization of these four described above.

A combat designer? He is a system designer specializing in combat systems.
A content designer? He is a somewhat UX oriented narrative designer
A game balancer? He is a level designer specializing in balancing numbers, therefore a bit oriented towards system design.

We are all game designers, and all game designers are designers!

My name is Paolo

Published by Paolo on 22/11/2021

My name is Paolo and I am a game designer. I live in Barcelona, ​​Spain.

I work as an employee for a company called Tangelo Games, where I am a senior game designer.

I also have a consulting business for small clients, I manage some projects and offer help on creative solutions.

Since the work has been growing a lot in recent months, I decided to start a blog to express myself. My insights, privileged moments of awareness.


I hope you can find some inspiration to make great games in these pages!

Feel free to contact me I am a pretty open person!