Skip to content

Tag: professional

Genre, target and quality

Published by Paolo on 27/06/2023

Genre

style or category of art, music, or literature.

target

a person, object, or place selected as the aim of an attack.

quality

the general excellence of standard or level.

(oxford language)

Often times I have a discussion around the concept of game genre and game target audience. Usually, the people involved with the business side change the cards on the table. But game design has its literature and history. This post is to clarify two simple concepts.

The game genre

The easiest way of thinking in the game genre is to look at yourself when you are looking for a game to play.

  • Do you want to relax? run a puzzle game on your mobile phone
  • Do you want a great story? You have the new JRPG available for your console
  • Do you need some challenge? A racing game can do the job.

The genre of a game defines its style or category, not its business model or the time to complete a session.

The game target

Everyone knows that we make games for an audience. The world of marketing and advertisers classifies that audience demographics. As game developers, instead, we focus more on behaviors and needs. One point of touch is the time we expect our Players will have to play the game.

  • If the players will have very little time, to relax: casual games
  • If the players want to release some stress for 40-60 minutes, also engage with other people: mid-core games
  • If the players want to escape reality for a while and focus on a set of challenges: hardcore games

The target of a game defines the motivations and time that the Players should spend in it, not its genre.

The game quality

According to the scope and the context, we can afford to make games of a certain quality standard. The quality of a game is often the point of touch between the industry and its players:

  • mobile game: they need to be lightweight and very accessible, so they often present pizzazz UI and simple visuals
  • Indie games: they are an achievement to show to the World. They don’t need super high production, also if visuals are very important for their success
  • AA games: they come from independent studios that have been backed by a bigger publisher.
    • AAA games: produced and distributed by major-sized publishers, Players expect very high quality.

The game quality defines from one side the context capability of the development team. On the other side, the standard of excellence that Players have come to expect. Players have concrete expectations of quality and quality is not comparable. You cannot compare indie with AAA, there is nothing to compare. You can compare AAA with AAA and have meaningful conversations. Every quality has its own set of standards.

Conclusion

The top companies I see out there specialize in a single genre and a single target. When they grow, they may want to expand to other qualities.

  • Your Players will never look for a “hyper casual game”. They will look for “something to play while I am on the bus”.
  • Players may want to know about the next AAA games coming out. The new Zelda game came out. Oh, but I have no time for such a big game right now.
  • Players don’t care if the menus of that mobile puzzle game have basic colors. But they can quit if the loading times among levels are too high.
  • If your AA game has not the right standard, some Player can complain that looks like a mobile game!

Vision notes on FFXVI

Published by Paolo on 26/06/2023

This weekend I downloaded and played the new Final Fantasy XVI demo on PS5.

I’m not going to give spoilers or give my opinion, because it’s not interesting. I am a gamer like many others, and working as a game designer I am certainly full of prejudices that limit my vision.

What I have noticed, however, is that the vision for the future of the saga includes:

  • Combat systems that focus on spectacle over strategy
  • Less depth in the characters’ stats and more depth in their profiles
  • Make life much easier for those who want to know more about the game world

Ultimately Final Fantasy has always been this: a rich world in which to immerse yourself. An epic adventure with very distinctive characters. And a lot of not-always-exciting fights.

With the arrival of Genshin Impact and Asian RPGs with massive audiences, in my opinion the creative directors of the saga are wondering how to make the series more modern. I must say that I like these types of experiments, beyond the final result.

It is a path that can lead to new masterpieces in the future, even if it is a difficult and so unpredictable path.

Kids are the base of your tree

Published by Paolo on 22/06/2023

When you think about your new game’s target audience, think about its childish version, too.

Many people consider video games something childish. Data shows that adults play video games. Children are the people who have the most time to play. They can become attached to the intellectual properties we create.

When we design a new game, we tend to think about people who are like us: adults. In case we have to design a game for children, it is more natural to think of a child audience.

If we design for the mini version of our players, too, we have the chance to create a more accessible and memorable experience. Some say we have to think of our audience like a tree. The target audience is the branches, but the trunk is very important.

The players of our products have all been children. Some of them have children. When we design our games we always think of children as well. This is how memorable intellectual properties are created.

Adults become attached to characters and worlds based on elements they can associate with their own life and context. Children do it experientially.

If we make an effort to always think of a child playing our game, the experience itself will undoubtedly be better. That is valid for any kind of game. Yes, also gambling.

Always a game designer

Published by Paolo on 21/06/2023

A lot of game designers when entering the world of games as a service become product managers.

They then go from working “in the product” to working “on the product”.

Probably in this way, they can access better salaries and not have to go through too many filters to see their ideas realized. Being a game designer in an industry where everyone interprets data in their own way is a big challenge. It takes a lot of patience and really trying to adjust to one’s view, even if it’s totally wrong.

I like to focus on the craft of game design. While I have my own way of looking at the data, I recognize that it is likely clouded by personal bias. So I prefer to focus on grounding ideas and bridging teams.

When a product manager tells the team that “we need to put our efforts into improving D1 retention”, the effect is like an orchestra of monkeys with trombones and drums. It means nothing in the mind of anyone who wants to know where to put the effort. The technical artist or programmer wants to know what they have to do, the numbers don’t make sense.

A game designer, on the other hand, knows that the product manager is referring to having a clearer core loop and a more powerful hook. Therefore, I will create a list of assets needed to unlock that technical artist. A series of configurations and flows to unlock the programmers.

For me, the step forward is not to become a product manager. The step forward for my career is dedicating myself to better games. But I will always remain a game designer.

STPIDS Devlog #1

Published by Paolo on 20/06/2023

Two months ago I started a side project called Gamafish, with two purposes:
1. Have a free space where to make the games I would like to see out there
2. Help junior talents to find their first job in the industry

The first game is a 10 minutes reverse bullet-hell called Super Tiny People in Deep Space (STPIDS). The idea is to play with the fantasy of the family and with simple controls (like “Vampire Survivors”).

I manage to find a small team of fantastic talents. Ignacio Krichman, Fabricio Gili Barboza, Jessica Fung and Bárbara García.

(We are looking also for a Unity developer, right now I am coding everything.)

Here you can see what we have done with around 10 hours per week during one month or so. Imagine what it could be full-time! 🙂

Devlog No.1

Data informed lenses

Published by Paolo on 15/06/2023

I’m just a regular-everyday-game-designer. The best game design book is The Art of Game Design.

I always use its deck of lenses. In my case:

  • I used them the first years of my path trying to convince people more expert than me (with scarce results)
  • I abandoned them to focus on data-driven approaches. I was readapting industry trends and practices to the games where I was working on. That is what a mid-game designer does in free-to-play.

Now with the experience, I am integrating those into my workflow again! Thesis, antithesis, and now synthesis.

Take a look at this one.

How can we use this in the data hegemony we have today?

You want to make a new game and need to run a couple of CPI tests, IPM, or whatever. You want to find the right experience to design.

  • What emotions do you want to show in your creatives? why?
    • KPI: Number of impressions
  • What emotions are Players (including me) having when they decide to click? Why?
    • KPI: click-through rate (CTR)
  • How can I bridge the gap between the emotions players are expecting and the emotion I’d like them to have in the game?
    • KPI: Installs per mile (IPM)

The art of vanity

Published by Paolo on 13/06/2023

Vanity metrics are metrics that are not used to make strategic decisions. They are used internally and externally by a team to make a good impression.

During the development of a video game, some useful metrics can become vanity metrics. The measure of MAUs, Monthly Active Users for example is often used as a vanity metric. An MAU is a player who has logged into the game at least once during the month. It is a measure that says little, with which few decisions can be made. Yet, if we have many MAUs, our partners and investors will be happy to know about it.

Another vanity metric I see in the world of premium development is the number of wishlists on Steam. Steam algorithm recommends your game based on the speed of getting wishlists. Wishlists are useful, but the metric representing the overall number is not. I have never seen a single company making strategic decisions based on that number. A premium games company decides to make a game and goes until the end. Having many wishlists motivates the team and piques the publisher’s interest. A textbook vanity metric.

Are vanity metrics useless?

Absolutely not! They help move things along, they help with certain discussions. I compare them to the placebo in medicine. Placebo is proven to work on so many occasions. Monitoring, presenting, and discussing vanity metrics allows us to unlock many situations.

If a game has tens of thousands of people returning every month at least once, this opens doors to investors. The fact of having many wishlists allows a publisher to focus their campaigns more on our game. The team benefits from it because it’s easier to prove that artistic decisions are the right ones. Proving artistic choices is hard, art has a strong aesthetic component. That’s where vanity comes in!

Data-informed indie development

Published by Paolo on 07/06/2023

I have a soft spot for indie game development. Yesterday I listened to the words of a developer friend who was generous enough to share his battles.

The metrics coming from the Players behavior inside of the game are ignored. This is very different from the game-as-a-service approach.

Game design has an artistic and a scientific component. The latter is based on hypotheses, theories, and experiments. The experiments before were only manual (playtest). After the advent of big data, machines can help us simulate the real world and conduct other kinds of experiments. Free-to-play games aim for a very high volume of players, that’s why you need a data-informed approach to update them properly.

Indie games, on the other hand, keep their focus on creating an original idea designed to please a niche. They are much riskier because there is no data-informed approach that allows a team to learn from one game to be better in the next. The game develops, publishes, and moves on to the next one.

One trend I see in free-to-play mobile is keeping an eye on the indie world for interesting core loops to adapt. Indie developers should in turn “steal” the data-informed approach to improve their processes. They can develop the next game more consciously.

Indie metrics starter pack

Let’s take the example of an indie Metroidvania game in early access on Steam. Let’s say the team has an update roadmap in mind. As an outcome, they want to create a DLC calendar that makes sense.

First Time Player Experience

The first thing to keep track of is the First Time Player Experience. Represents love at first sight, the hook. Its effectiveness can be measured in two ways:

  1. D1 retention: the % of total players who return to play after the 24 hours.
  2. FTPE Funnel: the % of total players who leave the game at each step that belongs to the first experience. We virtually put markers and measure how many people fail each one.

Difficulty curve

Level design is very important in this type of game. It is necessary to have a beat chart designed to measure the failure rate of each segment or level of the game. I suggest to measure:

  • Drop rate: the number of players who leave the game at each level or segment
  • Average completion time: the average time to complete the level or segment
  • Average attempts: the average number of attempts to complete the level or segment

This will measure the difficulty of your game and where you should tweak the levels or segments. In this way, during early access, we can make fixes effectively not just based on what we read on reviews.

Retention for DLCs

Last thing, the metrics needed to create a post-launch DLC roadmap. The best way to create an effective roadmap is to understand which game features people engage with the most. Players may prefer to find secrets or exciting battles. We can measure the retention and engagement of players who:

  • unlock certain achievements
  • eliminate many enemies
  • they discover secrets
  • they spend more time reading the dialogues and exploring
  • they use certain skills

Retention is measured by days. We need to check if a player returns after 24 hours, after 48, 72, etc. Those are, respectively, D1, D2, D3… retention!

Engagement is the number of times the Player runs the game over a 24-hour period. Then we check the average time spent in each game session.

We can use retention and engagement to create cohorts, subset of Players. Then we can think in an effective DLC roadmap to target the most interesting and decide a pricing strategy effectively.

Games with soul

Published by Paolo on 05/06/2023

I’ve been giving From Software games a quick spin lately. Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro. Late to the party, I know.

In this age of big announcements of new tools that save time and money, these games are a breath of fresh air for me. The genius of these titles lies in the fact that they have found a system. That design is for a very specific type of audience that buys and plays good games.

I don’t see huge technological feats, they have found a way to reuse graphic assets meaningfully. The studio owns in-house level design patterns that they reuse and adapt to every game. In this way, the development is dramatically simplified.

These games exude pure passion and great design techniques. Good design is not creating super innovative mechanics. It is understanding the players and designing also with costs and time optimization in mind. Is doing that without having to give up human creativity.

I don’t think it’s possible to create games of this type working with a clock in hand to check the time of going home. Inquiring on the net, I found information about the team. Passionate people who work a lot more than normal without bothering to define this as “crunch”.

This type of development is not for everyone, but we can all learn from this. Don’t trust technologies that promise to replace human creativity. With the right process, we ourselves are able to find the best ways to optimize time and costs.

On quality and passion

Published by Paolo on 29/05/2023

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve invested a lot of time listening to industry podcasts. Normally I do it while I’m cooking, before talking to my parents (as a proud Italian I talk to my parents everyday xD).

Listening to the experts, their judgments, and their concerns it seems that there is no point in doing mobile free-to-play if you do not:

– you find ways to have cheap installations

– create a pay-to-win game

– you save a lot on artistic production to ensure a high frequency of new content

Added to all this is the obsession of investors with numbers. If certain numbers don’t add up, it’s not worth investing.

One thing to be clear: I agree in general, even if my artistic side suffers. It’s true that a large part of my job is to ensure a design that allows for flexibility and scalability.

Quality and passion

In my experience, however, I have seen that there are some things that are constant in all games that we could define as quality:

– A game’s startup time is key to its success

– loading times in the game mark the difference in metrics

– game crashes are directly proportional to making people come back more times

– the number of steps needed to get to what you want makes all the difference. It’s not the same to tap PLAY and start playing as it is to tap PLAY and navigate a couple more screens.

Another thing that is not said enough is the importance of having a team that likes the game they are doing. We don’t make games for us, we are professionals and we make them for the players. But we feel clearly when we have a nice product ahead, even if it’s not for us.

It would be great to find a way to convert quality metrics and this sort of sensitivity into numbers on a spreadsheet. But I am afraid is very hard. Maybe it would convince more business people to take the right decisions.

Have a nice week everyone!