Hello and thank you for reading my blog. As you may have noticed, I wasn’t posting every day in the last 2 weeks. That is because I am closing my year and going off to vacations with my family.
I will return to post regularly on August, approximately. I need to enjoy a full disconnection and stay 100% with people I love. I need to read books and stay away from screens. My year was intense, full of work so I deserve that.
Have a great July and see you soon!
Game design uses technology to create entertainment. Entertainment is one of the words that have been corrupted in certain contexts.
In the dopamine culture, the dream of many is to attract the attention of the “users” and trap them forever. Entertainment is read as a synonym of “holding”, which is semantically correct.
Entertainment to me has much more in common with hospitality, instead. The act of being friendly and welcoming to guests and visitors.
Also in the Bible, we can read different translations (Hebrews 13:2):
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
King James Version
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
English Standard Version
It’s your call: entertainment as trapping the people’s attention versus entertainment as showing hospitality.
Are you holding or are you hosting?
Mine is always the latter, I create entertainment for human beings (and maybe angels, who know?), not monkeys.
There is some magic in the very first idea that comes to your mind when you start any creative endeavor.
When you start working on something new, it can be a project but also simply a task, you have that first intuition. In my experience, that first spark is often the most important one.
Some of the best songs in music history have been written in a few hours, too. And with creativity in general, it often happens the same.
But of course, this is just my sensation, I have no metrics, no data, no information to back it up. I don’t know if there is a general rule, a thesis, behind this.
I like to appreciate the beauty of things and not everything has to be estimated, measured, controlled, or predicted.
Long live the first sparks. They come out of nowhere, but more often than not they are the best choice.
When you are an employee you are there because you can do the job. Also because you can make THAT specific job, you master certain pipelines according to your level of experience. Finally, you are there because you can work in a team.
When you build your own company, you are working on creating an environment that permits your employees to build a business.
When you are a freelancer, you have a 1-person business that helps clients (usually companies) solve specific problems.
The social media era, the dopamine times in which we live suggests us “not to work for other people’s dreams”. That’s a weird lens to use to see the World. We forget the importance of sacrifice and duty for our societies to prosper.
There are different sets of skills that you need according to what you want to do. It’s not easy for me to suggest “Hey, did you lose your job? You are an expert, why don’t you build your own company?”. The responsibilities you have to tackle are completely others, and your experience will probably give you also a lot of biases. And most importantly, you should focus on the business, not on the pipelines.
The odds for a specialist to be successful in a completely different field are higher than in building a business in the same sector. The games business is full of doctors who built successful companies.
Some game designers out there can help solve wicked problems, outside of games. At this moment we have quite a few of them. That’s my wish, honestly.
Thanks to the help of two friends I have completed my deck to send as introduction to companies.
“Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are ‘costs’.”
(P. Drucker)
This is valid, to me, for every business, also small like mine. Over the last couple of years that I have dedicated to helping gaming companies with innovation, I had to learn a lot about marketing and innovate my business myself.
I could have gone easier with my proposal: “I make levels for your game”, “I write narratives for your game”, “I will fix your tutorials”, or “I will create FPS maps for your game”. But I am not a specialist! I have worked on so many projects that I consider myself skilled in starting them.
Do you need to lay down your vision for a new project? I am your man. My specialization is in innovation. As many game designers out there, the vast majority of games I have worked on were never published. This is the reality of our business.
I can predict lots of issues and tackle them before it’s too late. My analogy capacity make me create new things with few elements. And I touch everything: systems, gameplay, levels and narrative. I also build in engine.
I have an idea for a videogame buzzing in my head since many months. It should be an adventure game in a solar punk setting where the Player moves on a skate and fights capoeira.
The name of the project is Silinha for now. Silinha is the family nickname of my wife and I want to dedicate the project to her. In fact, also the main character should be similar to her.
The story is inspired by 3%, a Netflix Brazilian series. But I want it to be solar punk, utopic, not post-apocalyptic.
I have started sketching out ideas and engaging with the Solar punk community on Reddit. This is my very first concept:
It’s ugly, I know, but I can see a lot of things in it. It’s not a good concept to share with a team, but it works for a solo project. I didn’t use AI to generate it, I looked actively for images (skaters, capoeira, solar punk) and made a collage in GIMP. I sketched on top to get the layout and then used plain colors to fill the shapes.
It’s bad, it’s ugly, but it’s mine and it’s my first attempt. So I am happy with it!
This week I went to a fantastic event organized by GameBCN, a local video games incubator. They invited Anchor Point, a new NetEase studio that is opening doors in Barcelona. There was a talk on worldbuilding. I love narrative design, and the speaker was clear and inspiring.
I had the opportunity to meet my friends of the local games industry and, for the first time since years, I have noticed a clear disconnection between the world of LinkedIn and the real one. When I enjoyed LinkedIn the most, before and during pandemic, we didn’t have many tools to automatically create posts. LinkedIn has clearly suffered the process of enshittification that all social media have at some point.
Before it wasn’t like that. Before it was cool to meet in person the same people I met on LinkedIn and see that there were little difference. LinkedIn was a tool to facilitate connections, not followers.
People were worried, many of them are looking for a job or a project to work on. I am calm, honestly. When everyone is in the same situation, why worry at all? I can only focus on build my road, as I have always done.
Maybe it’s time to abandon LinkedIn, which is sad I have a good follow. I will start to use it differently, looking more for connections and less for reactions. Let’s see if the things improves…
Have fun out there, if you’re reading this!
Imagine this business: you write which furniture you want for your flat. A green sofa for your lounge. A carpet for the studio. A small library for your dorm. You select the image of what you like and, for the price of transportation, you get the furniture.
Imagine you live in a country where robbing apartments is not a felony. And you know that this furniture was stolen from someone. How would you feel? You may think in the short term, you don’t have money. You don’t want to go to IKEA and fight the whole day with your spouse. Plus, it’s no felony so who cares?
Let’s switch context for a while…
We have lots of hints and suggestions redacted by millions of people over the years. Doctors who tried to solve some specific health condition. Programmers helping others to understand how backend development works.
Every time we need this information to solve some problem or face a challenge, we invest our time in finding the right answer. Meanwhile, we learn about other things we didn’t consider. In some cases, being faster can save lives. In other, don’t.
Let’s take game development. The more you learn, the more things you spot you should consider, and the better your games will be. So, is it interesting to be faster?
Sometimes I am sure it is. Most of the time doesn’t.
LLM services offer a collage that makes you feel you can make art, or writing without having the talent needed to craft it. Like the stolen furniture example I made, they are a deliberate steal. They take things made by others and give them to you.
An interesting feature is that they provide a summary of hints too. You look for how to code something and they give you the code. You can be faster, but you need to understand what the code does. Also, the slow process of looking for solutions can make you discover things you didn’t consider. You have lost that if you surrender to LLMs.
In any case, they consume water and energy. They pay for that, but they pay a market price that I am afraid is not aware of the long-term damage.
It can be worth in a life-or-death situation. If a machine is better than the human eye to detect a condition, that case is good for LLMs.
Let’s talk about refusal as a generative act. The refusal has something similar to the design, to me. It identifies issues and creates new opportunities.
Right now in my industry, it’s a moment of change and challenges. Dramatic, somehow. But this is where things can change for the better. Refusal is a great tool we have.
I am reading on my feed dozens of posts written by people with huge experience who have been laid off. Now, these people are looking for work. It reminds me a little bit of the classic royal rumbles I watched on my television when I was a kid. Macho Man VS Hulk Hogan VS Ultimate Warrior… you get that! The most muscled guys in the world fake-fighting for a shiny belt.
Am I willing to join that? No, of course not! I can support this or that stunt, but I refuse to be in the ring. I am the guy with the big hand glove in the background, I love their spirit. But I am not joining that!
And this creates other opportunities for me. I work mostly with people who are starting to build new companies. People who are exploring a vision. There are lots of them, more than profitable companies for sure. There is a lot of work to do. And the more I help them, the more things I learn, the more I can help others.
And the best jobs I have had in my career, I mean full-time regular jobs, have started from this spark. Creativity, making games together. Not screening, filtering, testing, trying, questioning, and all these blockers.
That’s how, through the refusal of the standard processes, I keep and foster my passion for making games.
First screening with a web logical test? Not gonna happen. Unpaid home assignment? Not for me. More than 3 rounds of interviews? I am out.
Let’s meet for 2 hours in a room with a dashboard and a spreadsheet. Introduce me first to the producer and only at the end to the HR manager. Show me you’re looking for experience, design, and concreteness. Show me you want to make games.
I have created this post originally for LinkedIn. But then I removed it from there, because it can be read in wrong ways too.
Let’s talk about refusal as a generative act. The refusal has something similar to the design, to me. It identifies issues and creates new opportunities.
Right now in my industry, it’s a moment of change and challenges. Dramatic, somehow. But this is where things can change for the better. Refusal is a great tool we have.
I am reading on my feed dozens of posts written by people with huge experience who have been laid off. Now, these people are looking for work. It reminds me a little bit of the classic royal rumbles I watched on my television when I was a kid. Macho Man VS Hulk Hogan VS Ultimate Warrior… you get that! The most muscled guys in the world fake-fighting for a shiny belt.
Am I willing to join that? No, of course not! I can support this or that stunt, but I refuse to be in the ring. I am the guy with the big hand glove in the background, I love their spirit. But I am not joining that!
And this creates other opportunities for me. I work mostly with people who are starting to build new companies. People who are exploring a vision. There are lots of them, more than profitable companies for sure. There is a lot of work to do. And the more I help them, the more things I learn, the more I can help others.
And the best jobs I have had in my career, I mean full-time regular jobs, have started from this spark. Creativity, making games together. Not screening, filtering, testing, trying, questioning, and all these blockers.
That’s how, through the refusal of the standard processes, I keep and foster my passion for making games.
First screening with a web logical test? Not gonna happen. Unpaid home assignment? Not for me. More than 3 rounds of interviews? I am out.
Let’s meet for 2 hours in a room with a dashboard and a spreadsheet. Introduce me first to the producer and only at the end to the HR manager. Show me you’re looking for experience, design, and concreteness. Show me you want to make games.
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.