Skip to content

Tag: professional

Game designers in 2023

Published by Paolo on 02/02/2023

The Deconstructor of Fun team has written predictions for 2023. I would like to give advice to game designers who will be working on the new challenges the year promises.

#1 Organic Discovery Will Be Deceased

Working for mobile games means working with two gatekeepers who are constantly changing the tables. This brings various headaches and also affects the work of us game designers.

There are always winners, and if we look at the rankings over time we see that Google and Apple reward the oldest successful games. Many try to take away their primacy, but it is difficult since they are the favorites.

The article says:

The end of discovery also means that there will be no indie breakouts from small indie developers. Instead, the indie developers will have three options. 

  1. Sell their game to a safe harbor, such as Apple Arcade, Netflix, or similar. 
  2. Join one of the few powerful game companies taking over mobile.
  3. Exit mobile. 

On this point, I have to say that they have risked quite a bit. In our industry, there are always surprises. Some indie with a vision could make a game that would be played en masse by streamers and become a phenomenon. We wouldn’t see it coming.

I never believed in the k-factor, that wasn’t science. It was pseudoscience to sell ideas internally.

Focus on games that are appealing to streamers (maybe to play together with others).

Think about releasing a PC Steam and console version as well.

For me, the present of video gaming is this. There is gaming and there are various forms of accessing it. I think this is not the only way, but it would make life a lot easier for an independent team. Although it takes investment to publish on various platforms, so it’s good to keep it simple.

#2 Publishers Push to Off-Platform Payments

From what I read, there will soon be various alternative forms of payment. This requires us game designers to contribute to the gamification of payment systems. Let’s start documenting how flows are handled by games that use off-platform payments. Gaming experiences will become a bit more complicated, so it is good to think in reward the efforts.

#3 Paid UA Becomes a Break-Even Game

This is something we have little control over. Recently we are seeing the end of the hyper-casual business. It was a market where the same players passed from one game to another at a low cost. The joke no longer works of course.

I am still convinced of the design principles behind simple games. Players have always liked simple games. In the beginning, it was arcades, today it is hyper-casual. It is always good to think in simplicity, immediacy and snackability.

#4 The Safe Harbors Get Embraced

On this point there is little to add, it seems crystal clear to me. It is good to own and study these platforms if you work on these kinds of games. Our bosses will probably do business with them at some point! As mentioned earlier, gaming streamers also play a key role here. If some Netflix game manages to attract the attention of some major TikToker, it’s obvious that there will be great returns!

#5 Streaming Platforms Move into Mobile Games – for Now…

It is clear that there is a fever for these platforms to find the next blockbuster game. This means more work for us, which is good. These platforms will have their own clear ideas on what to do, based on their experts and analysts. As a designer, my advice is to facilitate things and not hinder them. We are the facilitators of the act of game design in a team. Our efforts should be directed at realizing the visions that come from above. And this we know is very hard, it’s a huge exercise in patience for some of us. My advice? Focus on the beauty of design as a craft, not on power points and OKRs.

#6 Venture Capitalists Will Face a Reckoning

I am seeing this first-hand with a client. VCs are at a stage where they are basically not doing VCs anymore. In this moment in history VCs already want to see results before they bet on a team. We must focus on designing the shortest path to concrete numbers to achieve. At this moment in history we cannot afford to explore all possibilities. We need to make decisions incrementally on other designs that already work. For some of us, this is difficult. My advice is to find a sideline activity where we can vent our pure creativity. For example, I play music and capoeira on my spare time.

#7 You Will Get Back to the Office – Fully Remote Becomes an Anomaly

I’m not sure I agree with this, in any case the DoF guys are more experienced so I assume they are right. It is much better to solve some issue in person. And it’s easier to build new teams with presence, honestly. This 2023 I wish you more face-to-face and fewer Slack notifications!

End of the year, end of the World

Published by Paolo on 20/12/2022

As we approach the end of the year, clients always become more demanding. I am afraid that I will have no time to post for a while since we have important deadlines to reach.

This post is to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

From February I will have two days a week that I can dedicate to some new clients.

My specialty is mobile f2p, but I’m definitely a very versatile game designer. If you need to transform your creative vision into a successful game, don’t hesitate and contact me! System, level, narrative, and UX/gameplay design. One person, multiple skills!

(The tariff is the right one to balance the loop described in the diagram below)

Start from Personas

Published by Paolo on 19/12/2022

When you study game design, you usually focus on documents and prototypes for small games. The first steps that are taught in educational centers are purely technical.

Then you are in the market without the skills that make you a professional designer. Which are not the techniques, but are those oriented toward the video game business.

Normally a team reports to one or more managers who maintain a business vision. Our role as designers is to understand how to realize this business vision. We have to think more about endorsing the product than creating something directly. Players will receive the product packed and polished. Technical skills are important, but our ability to understand the business is critical.

Personas are one of the methods that allow this communication across the whole team. I share with you this workshop that aired last Saturday. The audio is bad, but the content is excellent.

If you want to work for companies as an employee or consultant, you need to come up with frameworks that solve concrete business problems. Thinking about who will really play and how to structure a product for them requires effort and is not intuitive.

NO TO AI GENERATED IMAGES

Published by Paolo on 15/12/2022

These days a protest is taking place on the ArtStation platform. Seeing some works generated with AI climb to the top positions, artists are uploading this pic everywhere.

I find that a very sensible and clever idea. I think artists are in a moment where they have to defend themselves. I want to dedicate this post also to confirm the fact that they are right. Artificial intelligence-generated works are not art.

Art is a human matter

To compose a work of art you need specific materials that are able to formalize forms. In this sense, artificial intelligence has things in common with human work. AI works on materials, in the case of digital art digital materials. But art to be art must be a physical expression of the human imagination. Artificial intelligence algorithms do not imagine. They realize a vision based on the algorithmic processing of a prompt.

If I want to create an image of my mother, I can imagine many things. I can think at any given moment that I want to put a particular pin or a special kind of tree behind her. If an algorithm has to imagine anything, it relies solely on a semantic decomposition of a sentence. The algorithm having no imagination does not add anything that is not within its analysis.

Art is a process

If human beings were able to realize what he has in mind without going through sharpening the points of the pencils and without tracing everything, they would not be human beings. They would be a deity. It would not be art, it would be a divine creation. Art requires a process. Artists are able to deal with this process. We are perfectly capable of recognizing art created with artificial intelligence. The fact that there is a market is due to the fact that creations are human. There will never be a big market made up of works generated with artificial intelligence.

In the case of video games, obviously artificial intelligence can be used to create variants of elements already created by human beings, to optimize processes. I find this interesting. Anyway, it is foolish to think of entrusting the creation of a product solely to machines. It will never be an artistically valid product.

Art starts with aesthetics

Aesthetics is the science that studies the essence of things. Art therefore also includes science (and this thing does not happen the other way around). This study is an activity that requires a lot of mental energy and all the CPUs on earth would not be enough to realize what the brain of one toddler is capable of. Studying the essence of things means imagining, forming a point of view, and expressing it with theories. Turn these theories into a thesis. It is a very difficult process even for us. How many good artists do you know? Few. These few artists are people who have succeeded in this mission: to study the essence of things. Have an aesthetic sense.

Artificial intelligence applies an algorithm to a context. This algorithm operates in a pre-determined way on each challenge it faces. The algorithm evolves and improves, of course, but it doesn’t imagine. It does not create theories, it does not seek theses. It does not reflect the aesthetics of things. It does not seek its essence.

AI art is not art.

Second love letter to the juniors

Published by Paolo on 14/12/2022

Dear junior,

One of those moments of radical change has arrived in our sector. I think you too have seen a beautiful image or a surprisingly well-written text. You will certainly have noticed that artificial intelligence algorithms have learned to generate content that is indistinguishable from human content.

I think we are ahead of a revolution, like the one that happened years ago with the arrival of 3D technologies. The revolution will inevitably involve the world of game development.

Not only do these tools allow for quick content generation, but they also learn from all the people who are entering their prompts. It is likely that in a short time the AI will optimize also the creative part of writing prompts.

There have been abuses in my opinion. Developers trained these systems with content taken from the web, without the consent of the people who generated them. Think of everything you’ve written on the Internet, think of all the articles, think of all the images posted on the most famous sites. Someone took all these images, codes, and texts and fed the algorithm which is now able to accurately imitate even the style of concrete people. I don’t know if this thing will be punished sooner or later. However, “the omelet is done”, as we say in Italy, and now these tools are there.

What does this mean to you?

The goal is human replacement

First of all, this technology has the main goal of replacing humans in certain activities. Those tools are capable to be faster of any artistic process. However, nothing can replace a human being. Our learning capacity is far superior to any existing mainframe. We are already quite capable, almost instinctively, of recognizing most AI-generated art. Did you noticed that? In the case of video games, one of the things that drive people all over the world to play games is the chance to see something created by other people.

This admiration surprises us, we like to talk about it with friends and online. “Have you seen the new God of War? They did an incredible job!”. It’s not God of War itself that surprises us as a game, it’s the thought that there are people who have been able to do this that creates a market. Games entirely made by AI will never have a big market, don’t worry. There will probably appear some pantomime of a game. And maybe someone will get rich thanks to that. But it will never be a big market, that’s my bold prediction.

Less bullshit jobs available

The second point is that surely someone will think about hiring fewer inexperienced people. In fact, many junior professionals are hired to support seniors in smaller tasks. Think of an RPG, maybe there are secondary characters in a city that the Players will visit. These characters will have barks to say, and these barks are usually left to junior writers. It will probably be possible to automate this process using AI. So that, it will so no longer be necessary to have a junior person who writes these contents. It will be enough to have only one person who will edit things already written by a machine.

However, studios will always need senior staff. And senior people inevitably have to go through the junior stage. It is convenient for the studios to also hire juniors so that one day they will become seniors. There will be less work, that’s for sure. If a company thinks of just automating, it means that that company doesn’t appreciate the value of human imagination. It means you won’t get that job, but that job was probably a bullshit job. You saved yourself a problem, believe me. My advice? Learn the techniques of your profession while also taking into account these new technologies. Be confident in your creative personality, but show that you also dominate these technologies.

We are afraid of The Terminator

The last point is that we don’t really know what will happen with all this. We can assume that the professional world will never be the same again. But we don’t know, maybe next week we discover a big scandal involving these new technologies. Maybe we will have proofs that someone stole intellectual property content from the web. As a result, regulators will shut down all these technologies. The world sometimes changes in a matter of a few hours. And this happens to us too! Therefore, when something really surprises us, the first reaction is defense. We think we’re going in the wrong direction, and maybe we’re even dramatic at times. Our defense mechanisms are also unpredictable. My final advice, therefore, is to accept the beauty of our nature as it is. Let all innovation amaze us, don’t be afraid of anything. ‘Cause none of them can stop the time, as someone said.

My feels and fears

Published by Paolo on 12/12/2022

I lost a professional contact the other day due to a personal point of view expressed online. My point of view is not yet formed, but we know the medium well. We often say things that aren’t reasoned enough, that’s how it is nowadays.

This person said that AI art violates the rights and people working in digital art. As far as I know, AI art algorithms try to mimic the learning process of a human artist. A huge amount of human work feeds the machine. Then the algorithm generates art based on the interpretation of a prompt.

It is possible to write prompts quoting famous artists’ names to achieve a very similar style.

This makes me think a lot. I’m impressed by the ability that a tool like Midjourney of inspiration offers me. I’m concerned about the use made of the results of these technologies.

It is abuse, in fact, even for me. I lost contact due to a misunderstanding and it doesn’t matter. Friendship remains, as we say in Italy. Yet, I agree that inspiration is one thing and copying is quite another.

Throughout my career, I’ve always watched artists take inspiration from Pinterest and ArtStation. Someone copied at least some parts. But the result is achieved with effort, which is being torn down today.

I feel these new technologies are like the advent of 3D. I feel that they are something really revolutionary and wonderful.

But I’m afraid that these technologies are abusive in so many ways. Our creativity must be preserved because it is what distinguishes us from animals. We cannot allow something created by us to hurt the souls of people in the name of higher productivity.

It is necessary to regulate.

Improve your imagination

Published by Paolo on 09/12/2022

Nothing and no one can take imagination away from us. New technologies can certainly allow a person to multiply productivity. This will inevitably lead entrepreneurs to hire fewer people.

The world before the invention of spreadsheets needed less skilled labor. Elevators were driven by a person. Those jobs are not available anymore. C’est la vie.

The human being will always be irreplaceable in the imagination. Worry about your imagination and let the machines do the repetitive work.

Create tools only for good games

Published by Paolo on 06/12/2022

As game developers, we often focus on the wrong things which can lead to not achieving our objectives. We might worry about having the wrong team or not having enough time or money, but there is one thing that we don’t talk about enough: production choices.

In f2p, a mistake is to focus on developing development tools without first having a profitable game. For example, if you have a game with characters with their stats, you might develop a tool that allows you to update and set those statistics. But if the game itself doesn’t work, then that tool will have been a wasted effort.

In the past, it was common for developers to create an engine for a series of games. It meant investing a lot of time and money into something that hadn’t been proven to work. The development team would then focus on making the best engine rather than the game itself.

The great masters of game development have always said that the key is to focus on the game itself. The tools should be developed to support the game, not with plans for possible “plan B” games in mind. There are countless examples of games that were unknown or failed, but had great tools behind them.

In short, it’s important to focus on the game itself over the development tools. Only by doing so can we achieve our objectives and make great games.

Respect the art of game design

Published by Paolo on 28/11/2022

I met a prospective client the other day who needed simple service. Given a set of published games, derive a design document that specifies everything that should be included in the final game.

The goal of the document was for a programmer to take it and figure out exactly what to do to produce the final game.

I told him his dream is beautiful, but that remains so. Making a game is not an assembly line; the specification documents that other developers need to work with must be produced based on real development needs.

The best way to be successful in video games is to maintain a certain degree of realism and respect for this art that is so difficult to master.

They said me “no” again

Published by Paolo on 23/11/2022

I got in touch with a manager of an important company for a position that was definitely too big for me. Anyway, trying never hurts. I had the opportunity to take part in a selection process. The process included a technical test that I had to deliver in a time frame set by myself. I accepted, even though I had promised myself not to. I carried out the test and also asked for help from people more experienced than me, for feedback. These people helped me, thank you, Susan and Katie.

After two weeks I got the answer. I didn’t pass the test. The answer came accompanied by comprehensive feedback on the reasons. I read the reasons, I would have liked to defend my assessment in a videocall. Yet, re-reading my proof and reading that feedback I find myself agreeing on many points.

Feedback

A constant in my life is that they tell me I don’t get straight to the point and I arrive as confused. I seem too academic and introduce concepts that aren’t always very clear.

Then there are comments about typos, but I’m not a native speaker.

Some questions have been interpreted by me from a different point of view. So my answer came as wrong.

Conclusions

Technical tests serve to prove how a designer structures a problem to derive systems. There are two basic types of thinking in this regard.

  1. There are holistic system thinkers, who look at the big picture to find patterns.
  2. There are those reductionists who start from the details and then get to the big problem.

I am a professional of the first type. In a short time frame, it’s hard for me to get straight to the point. And this is a big problem for technical tests. I have never passed a single technical test in my life. I believe that is because of this. But I’ve always worked, and I must say that my colleagues are always quite satisfied with my work.

I shouldn’t agree to take assessments during the selection process. For me, they are a big commitment. Following, an unnerving wait. And the answer is always no.