Every gaming business founder wants to reach that milestone. 1M players and counting. So, how do you design for 1M?
You simply don’t. You design for 3-7 people instead. Be prepared for the growth, of course. But good design is a personal thing. Is for someone!
Who’s that someone? When you work for a company, that someone is first of all your manager. You don’t design for players, you design with players in mind. But your client is your manager.
You should first convince her!
There are many approaches to game design, but the most common ones are two: “theme -> mechanics” and “mechanics -> theme”.
Sid Meyer is one of the most famous representatives of the “theme -> mechanics” approach. In that fashion, you start from a fantasy, an experience you want to offer to the Players. Then you describe all the mechanics needed to realize that fantasy. Mechanics should offer meaningful choices for the theme to be properly implemented.
Shigeru Miyamoto is a master of the other approach, mechanics -> theme. His games try to find the most engaging and fun mechanics with lots of possibilities. Those games offer surprising twists, using a Japanese technique inherited from drama: kishotenketsu. The mechanics define new in this way new themes. If you look at the most famous games, the theme sounds pretty crazy. It’s because it is defined by mechanics, not the other way around.
What about us? Should we choose one approach and go for it or look for a synthesis? That is up to you, to me the important thing is to be aware of our choice and not leave it to chance.
Living as an underdog has its challenges. I own my time, but that income is unstable. I have a pretty austere lifestyle and few expenses. And I live in a place with free healthcare and stuff like that.
Still, I need to get some extra income for bad times. That is why teaching is the first resource for me. I love to teach and I am good at it.
My target audience is students between 18 and 25 years old. And they are on TikTok. That is why I started a TikTok channel. I already hate myself, but the important thing is having fun and connecting with people here.
Wish me luck.
You can buy a plot of land and start planting crops. You may want to build some structure and make changes on the land. You start a new business. Then you may hire farmers to take care of your land and make it grow.
The same is valid for the game as a service business. Often the people who start a game are not the people who make it grow. Often you need a certain type of people to find something new, a new land. But then you may want expert farmers to make it grow.
It’s not that people cannot do both, it’s a matter of will. Creating a brand-new experience requires the ability to spot opportunities and connect the dots. Maintaining and making a game grow requires analytical skills, instead.
Someone says that one thing is to go 0-to-1, and another 1-to-1000.
You have probably seen something like this:
I cannot say that is an universal rule, but it makes a lot of sense to me. So, if I would start a new games company without investors, I will definitely go for GOOD and CHEAP games.
Do you know why companies spend so much on marketing, especially advertising? Because once the game is done, all the effort has been made they HAVE to sell it.
Probably if they would spend more on keeping and growing talents they will have better games and should spend less on marketing. And I am ironic when I say “probably” because that’s for sure.
The more I work with my creativity the more I feel the urge to learn how to negotiate better my conditions. Because a simple design can become gold for someone in the future.
If your manager or client gives you a specific goal, you should be able to think of everything you need to consider your tasks done.
Game design is also design, so that is also solving problems. Frankly, it’s hard to predict precisely everything you will encounter on your path.
Use the help of the AI to improve this part. AI will probably give you lots of wrong information, too. But it’s great to not have to start from scratch.
Try out a prompt like this:
“You are the lead game designer for a new game. [add here more detail on the game]. Your manager gave you 2 weeks to complete a {task}. Write in a table format all the steps needed to reach the goal successfully. Please, use this {columns} format.{task}: tutorial
{columns}: days, tasks title, description, KPI, needs”
(you should edit and tailor this prompt, it’s just an example NOT a template)
When you have the output, work on that table and prepare to make the right promises to your manager/client.
PRO TIP: it’s better to promise 1 thing and deliver 3 than 3 things and deliver 1. Fight for your rights! If you see 5 tasks that you can do in 2 weeks, tell them you can do 2-3. Then surprise them with the rest, in case you manage to be fast! We suck at estimations, and that’s a human feature, not a bug. But the reason for that is for another post.
There are two lenses with which to check the visual style of your game. Consider them in this exact order.
Common visual styles are cartoon, stylized, low poly, and realistic.
Remember: first there is the invitation to play and then the realization of a fantasy. To balance those two things is an art. The art of game design. Especially the marketing and art department are responsible for that. Game designers help their communication.
I was walking with a friend and we were thinking about why so many f2p games aren’t good, from a design point of view. So excluding bad market research, imprecise budgets, lack of planning, and things like that.
There are games that are enjoyed by players more than other games that are essentially identical. Is it due solely to the firepower of marketing? Or is there something in the design?
For me, there is a great responsibility in game design. Game design intended as the collective effort of the whole team, from the head of product to the junior QA.
On the one hand, there is the problem of copying, without understanding why a certain type of game works. A desk is a dangerous place from which to see the World, John Le Carré said.
At the other extreme we find teams capable of empathizing, but who do not share the typical practices of free-to-play. They never spend a cent on a game downloaded for free, they don’t put themselves in the players’ shoes. Even if they have the ability to empathize, they do not.
Games that fail do so for a thousand different reasons. Those that are successful, however, have always a clear reason behind it: a team that believes in the product. And it does so because empathizes with the Players. There is a cultural discourse that must be taken into consideration.
The company culture is shaped by each person who comes in with their own energy. You can define the values you would like in your team, but people are much more complex. It’s about understanding what people are with you and what you can create with that. The empathy starts with you.
Empathy means putting yourself in a player’s shoes and participating in the event you launched this weekend. Become a player of your game, play your game every day. Be present in playtests where unknown people try your game and also other similar games. If your team connects with people, a social casino game can be very stimulating even for a technical artist who wants to create RPGs.
Every game designer has experienced at least once in their life the horrible feeling of being deprived of their ownership.
You design a new game mode, a mechanic, a progression, an economy. You spend your attention and energy on it, perhaps for weeks. And the person in charge of the project, a producer or product manager, changes everything without warning.
It’s hard, I’ve even left companies for things like this. But it happens. It’s a huge lack of respect disguised as “sorry, but the project needs this“, “the data speaks clearly!“, “I wasn’t convinced…“.
The reality is that there are very few true creative leaders and changing numbers on a spreadsheet or in-game setups requires no skill. The pressure that some people feel leads them to this disastrous behavior. So what to do?
Seeking an agreement and understanding the problem is the first step. Many people want to be successful, others want the team to be successful. Some think more broadly about the entire company. We need to understand what motivated the choice.
This is a wrong choice, in every sense. A serious mistake. But we do it too, let’s remember this. I therefore recommend staying calm to make the correct decision.
Making games is hard…