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Tag: professional

My testimonial book

Published by Paolo on 30/11/2023

Today in the morning I sent many emails to my clients to ask them to write a brief endorsement for me. Let’s hope to get enough answers!

The fact is that I lose many opportunities because new potential clients ask me for a portfolio… and I cannot show anything at all! In fact, for each project, I sign contracts that include an NDA. I cannot reveal anything about the project I am working on.

That’s why my idea is to have people speak about me. A testimonial book to show potential clients the moment I introduce myself. I prepared a document on Google Docs for each one with their face, name, title (at the moment we worked together), and the space to leave a few words.

I am excited and at the same time worried that not more than 30% will answer my request. That’s because writing an endorsement for someone is not a trivial task. Especially when the language is not your native one. I asked them to use the English language.

We’ll see, I suppose.

The mind behind the tool

Published by Paolo on 27/11/2023

A tool without a good mind can become a piece of garbage, an obstacle, a weapon, and many other things. The problem is never the tool, but the fact that not any tool is useful to everyone.

That’s why I tend to stay suspicious when I see best practices. That is why I don’t use any tool without making it mine, somehow.

If you give me a space rocket, which can be seen as a space travel tool, I will probably sell it. Or make a mess, I don’t know. The problem is that I am not prepared to use that tool. It’s amazing, but just not for me.

I see a dangerous trend on social networks like LinkedIn. It is proven that strong opinions spread better with the algorithm. People tend to make declarations like brainstorming are useless. Roadmaps are killing your product. Design documents are a waste of time.

All of those things are just tools. Great games have been created by using those tools at certain points. It’s a matter of mindset, not tools.

Returning to our example, best practices are great for unlocking meaningful discussions. But most of the time, they are bad to just speed up the process. We can say that the no.1 best practice is that you need time to make things simpler and better.

The pizzaiolis preproduction

Published by Paolo on 24/11/2023

(The post was inspired by the last podcast from Seth Godin and a bunch of other things)

I live in Barcelona, but I was born in Naples the city where the pizza was born. Every time I travel I see famous pizza chains spread all across the World. Probably everyone with my background finds that pizza awful.

How is it even possible that people eat something like that?

But that pizza sells, and volumes are probably higher than the pizza places I know. The ones that make me dream of coming back to my hometown. Professional “pizzaioli” from Naples make the better pizza, at least in my opinion. But they earn less than entrepreneurs who probably never put a foot in one of their franchises.

Is that even fair?

It is what it is. There is a convenient way of making a pizza, that is looking for big volumes to make a profit. But the final product is worse for the connoisseur.

Then there is the inconvenient way of doing pizza, the one that makes people dream. You cannot reach high volumes without ruining the experience. You need simple ingredients. People need to eat at the moment. You have to be patient. But your legacy will last.

The inconvenient way leads the way to the convenient one. Once you find the right formula, you can decide to go for more volume. The pizza entrepreneur, instead, will have a hard time figuring out how to start an inconvenient pizza place. When you start from convenience you miss important steps.

The best preproduction of new games is exactly like the inconvenient pizza place. You need to understand well the market by serving a small niche first. You need innovation coming out from a true personal thing. You need to lead with uncertainty. You have to be patient, using simple game design ingredients. And this is hard, especially for big companies. That’s where I help my clients find new ideas in a professional “pizzaiolo” way. 

An epic win is always possible

Published by Paolo on 23/11/2023

I was watching the Half-Life documentary released by Valve a few days ago. Right at the start Dave Riller says “I think most of us had no game development experience… There were 3 or 4 people who had actually shipped a game before”.

This story repeats over and over in the history of games. Baldur’s Gate (the first one) has a similar story. League of Legends, too.

But that was a different time, right? Nowadays, games are more complex and you need a lot of experience to make a successful game.

I discovered this game called Atomic Hearth thanks to a new friend I made here in town. It was released this year, the first game from a remote multi-national small company. They reinvented Bioshock. Huge success.

Someone tells you that you can’t be successful with juniors. Other people say that your first game cannot be a success. You need to fail 50 times, first. I often tend to believe the same things, but facts contradict me every single time.

The history of games teaches us that an epic win is always possible. Do the best you can do with the resources you have. The future is built very often by people belonging to the future. Our industry is where it is because people with no experience had their chance at some point.

Data driven is not fortune telling

Published by Paolo on 20/11/2023

Over the last 10 years, I have assisted in the rise of many services and information providers that offer concrete predictions based on data. I had to quit a big company too, because of that. They were also testing game concepts based on the people’s responses to some text. So everything we proposed was texted out using a text redacted by someone with a high salary and very few things to do.

I went to a local indie fair where a friend pitched a game to publishers. One of them said, “Don’t you know that games with vegetables do not work?”. Then we ask why the publisher’s business model doesn’t work. It’s because of things like that!

Games are made by people who believe in a concrete vision and work hard to deliver. Many games will fail, because maybe people are not interested, because of the quality or many other factors. But you cannot use data to predict the success/failure of something without having tested it out.

Data-driven (or better, data-informed) development works when you work with concrete data from your things and compare them with your past. It doesn’t work when you read data from others and try to replicate it blindly. Sometimes it works out, but it’s because of other factors. It’s always because there is a passionate team behind that did something great. And lots of luck, the state of the market, and factors you can never control.

You can avoid risks by going iterative, of course. You can test prototypes and demos and see the actual reaction of people to that. That is good. But you cannot assume “this kind of game with these features is working in the market, so if we made something like this we would probably have success”.

The silent contract between the players and the designers

Published by Paolo on 17/11/2023

When we play games for work we often misunderstand the real motivations for the true fans to play that game.

Maybe we are working on a social casino game but we don’t really like this kind of games, as players. So that we study that game from a cold perspective. And we can also think that it would be easy to replicate mechanics and dynamics. Social casino games have really simple interactions, right?

Then the degeneration of that discourse leads to something worse. We start believe that a machine can build this in series. Today everyone is talking about AI, but also before of that there were kinds of fun experiments.

one of the best GDC talk ever!

But then we notice that these kind of experiences are hardly successful out there. Best social casino games have teams of more than 50 people working hard and passionately every day to deliver the best experience.

To me there is a silent contract between the Player and the Designer. For designer I mean the whole team, also. That silent contract states that there is a creator from one side that propose a challenge to another person on the other side. The motivation to play (or fun, if you prefer) comes mainly from this contract.

You decide to play a game. You know that the game has been made by someone. Part of the challenge is to beat that someone’s mind. If you read reviews of games you will notice that many comments go in the directions of creators.

What happens if the Player know that a machine created that game? Will they give these games the same value? People are smarter (and dumber) than we think.

Generalists are the concierge of the industry

Published by Paolo on 14/11/2023

I hear this sentence from a content creator on TikTok. Somehow, it makes me sad. Part of that is true, though. The industry needs for specialized talents, normally.

But many of us are generalists, not specialists. I don’t know if I prefer systems, gameplay, level or narrative. I like game design in general and I believe I am pretty good at it. Am I useful for the core industry? Maybe that content creator is right, maybe I am not good to stay in a big company.

Or maybe is completely wrong. We can see that many experts consider the generalists like me a great asset in a team. Maybe we are not good to finish the definitive job, but we moves easily across departments.

In the end is a matter of ego. If you are a generalist and you want to make everything alone, I have bad news for you. You need to work on it or go solodev (which is something I always consider, not for this reason). If you are capable of working with others, you can make a great generalist!

The Player is YOU

Published by Paolo on 09/11/2023

There is something I love in tabletop games rulebooks: they refers to YOU, not to the Players in general.

I think that documentation should adapt a similar method in order to the readers to empathize with the Players. You introduce who are the Players and their traits, behaviors and needs. And then you invite the reader to be one of them.

Using you instead than third persons can really improve with simplicity the effectiveness of your docs.

On analysis and deconstructions

Published by Paolo on 07/11/2023

In the last decade lots of satellite businesses built around the games. I have to say, especially since the boom of free-to-play, late 2012. One of them is analysis and break downs.

There are lots of services that offer data and screenshots of existing games, successful or not. A company or a private may pay a subscription to get access to those and save time in theory. Make better forecasts.

I have learned over the years that business managers hate uncertainty. Also if it is almost impossible in games to predict a success, economists and marketers hate what we game designers love the most: getting lost into a forest of creativity. Iterate, until the game is perfect. Business people prefer instead to rely on data from other companies, other contexts, other teams and follow their lead. If you want to work as a game designer for the industry, you have to deal with this bs.

I believe instead that every context is a different context. That our life is short, like very short (probably you will have around 40 summers left, think about it). It’s better to create something unique and maybe fail. Than create something that somehow already exists… and then fail!

It’s interesting to read break downs and analysis, but do not forget: those games we love are made by other people in other countries with other budgets and history. Never forget this and focus on put your own voice out. Own your thing.

Be a professional

Published by Paolo on 02/11/2023

There was a time when companies decided if you were apt to join the games industry or not. That time is well gone.

I see a lot of messages on social networks, especially LinkedIn, by people looking for the next gig in a company. Someone is looking for the first job. Which is normal and good, LinkedIn was created exactly for that reason.

But, you cannot permit to stay at the border of the river waiting for your opportunity to pass. You have to be what you want to be first. Don’t just look for a job, do the job.

Many years ago it was impossible or very hard to do something without working for a company. Companies acted like a filter, they decided somehow you were worth or not. That is not the case anymore. You have all the material to do what you like to do. In case you have to pay the bills, there are nowadays alternatives to do that.

Be a professional first, then companies will look for you! It’s not the other way around anymore.