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Tag: professional

On setting the right expectations

Published by Paolo on 24/01/2025

Yesterday I was arguing with a LinkedIn influencer about the expectations that EA had on Dragon Age: The Veilguard. His point was that the game had 1.5M players instead than 3M expected by EA. So the game was lacking appeal for the players.

My point, instead, was that a game that reaches that impressive number (in only 2 months) is definitely an appealing game. Then the game can be good or bad. But for sure it has appeal. The expectations set up by EA execs, instead, were out of reality. The error was theirs, not developers mistake.

He told me that the budget invested in marketing was enormous (no data added) so that the game should have had more players. Plus, the fact of having players doesn’t mean that every player bought the game. That is true, but today if someone decides to invest part of their free time in your game is a miracle. Today we have lots of distractions, it’s hard to reach Elden Ring’s numbers, just to make an example.

The problem is that today we are still setting expectations too high in a landscape with serious distribution and attention challenges. I haven’t played Dragon Age. The Veilguard (I have no time), and I read many different opinions on it. The game is a good game, and it’s appealing. But it was a deception for EA, because of their expectations on it. Those are hard times for forecasters.

Grow your hirings

Published by Paolo on 23/01/2025

Every project has a level of learning and skill building for a game designer. It’s very important for a team to be able to guarantee a space for your members to learn. It’s way more optimal to grow your designer than to hire someone already expert, to me.

I say this because the history of games backes my theory. The strongest IPs in the world have been built by people who became experts while they were building.

Many veterans ex-Riot, ex-Blizzard, founded their own independent studios got funded, but they are not delivering too much. Being an expert in something specific brings lots of bias on the table too.

It’s cheaper and safer to grow your people.

Beat your limits

Published by Paolo on 22/01/2025

The majority of job offers I see out there look for people who already are in the same area. Having lateral or different experience can be beneficial in a new project, so why is that?

I don’t have the final answer, but I don’t want always the same thing. I worked a lot on mobile free-to-play and now I am working with premium PC. I am happy with that, the results will come I hope.

It’s good to be “incompetent” at something if you have the will to learn. Identify the systems, engage with the players of that kind of games, discover your own limits. And overcome them.

What to do when you don’t know what to do?

Published by Paolo on 17/01/2025

Often it happens that your team is developing what you have defined in your design documentation. It happens that you don’t know specifically what to do next.

I use these moments to play competitor games and engage with their audience. I join Discord servers, lurk subreddits, and so on. I try to keep myself in the shoes of a Player of my references.

The second thing I do is to play the last build or the last code version intensively. As a game designer you need to be aware of what game is coming out.

I also keep ordered single big documents containing everything that has been already defined and implemented in the game. It is very useful to keep track of the vision and its progress.

State of Videogames 2025

Published by Paolo on 15/01/2025

As every year, Mr. Matthew Ball dropped a set of slides containing his takes on the state of the games industry. You can read it here in multiple formats.

To me it’s interesting to read these documents mainly to understand the mentality of business people. But those charts and sentences are fundamentally biased towards the macro. The rational side of the business of making games, the statistics. They ignore most of the other part, which exists and it’s equally important. The intuitive side of games, the art. The “we make this game because we believe that we need to say these things”. That is also what makes games so great.

Also, I do not agree with his call for growth. He says that videogames overgrew the countries GDP and then he says that the industry should grow further? I don’t think so. The industry should become more realist, instead.

Mismanagement

Published by Paolo on 13/01/2025

I read an article on Bloomberg written by one of my favourite journalists, Jason Shreier. It talks about some of the things that make a videogame fail.

Mismanagement is the keyword for that article. Mr. Shreier shared the article and the reactions were critical with managers. Which makes sense, managers are responsible for the management.

The piece mentioned also an employee who declared things like: “I spent some days just watching Netflix“.

Is this still a manager responsibility?

As an Italian my ethics at work are different from one gal in Shangai or an average lad in San Francisco. So, take my words are mere opinions.

It is common to be in the situation “I don’t know what to do”. Not everyone has the drive to find always something to do even when nobody sent any task. In complex projects, and videogames are wicked ones, there is always something to do.

Part of me believes that there are no excuses for that behavior. If you are watching Netflix while the company is paying you a salary, you are behaving unprofessionally. Another part accepts that we are all different and one can be a talent, but have not enough drive in some moment.

Mismanagement is not always a fault of managers. It still is their responsibility. That’s why it’s hard to find the right managers for a project.

Design works on forms

Published by Paolo on 09/01/2025

In a perfect world with perfect projects made by perfect people, you make a game only when the vision is defined. In that perfect world, building the game means executing the vision.

We live in the normal World, though, and you see rarely a vision defined at project start. As a designer you encounter a direction that is try to understand what to do.

The best way to serve them and the rest of the team is to make concrete choices and execute them.

While directors are looking at the landscape from over the clouds, designers work on the ground. Game design is making concrete choices on a game, no matter what. From the top they say “yeah, sure, let’s try this but then let’s try that“, and it’s fine (well, it’s not fine, but it happens). What we can do is to execute (if we are allowed to). We should find the “this” to execute and go for it.

I have seen the prototyping as a tool for procrastination. To give something to do to the team while the direction can get that eureka moment. That often brings the teams to a bad track. Many potentially good games weren’t successful because of that.

Prototyping is a tool to find the form. But it can be one of the slowest and more expensive ways of finding the substance. It’s hard to build a vision through a set of prototypes.

Researching and engaging with competitors are the best way to understand the substance. Plus, a lot of patience.

Good news for the ecosystem

Published by Paolo on 08/01/2025

Today’s news is that ex-Annapurna staff is acquiring the Private Division team. This means that Annapurna Interactive (the official one) will continue make “transmedia” things with contractors. Meanwhile, Take Two interactive will focus on live service PC and mobile games.

Win win for everyone. I hope this newly formed team do great things. Especially, I wish they start from small things. I have said this many times, I will repeat it: to me the games industry is like a forest.

And a forest to be healthy needs not only big trees. It needs also the underwood, the little mushrooms. The ants working everyday, the snakes representing a danger. Over the last 5-10 years the expectations from investments and media were just looking at the big trees like Roblox and Fortnite. But for Roblox and Epic to survive, a healthy ecosystem needs also small games. AA games, indie games, instant games. Small games.

Someone said “no” to LotR

Published by Paolo on 31/12/2024

The biggest Italian books publisher rejected The Lord of The Rings, many years ago. The first reaction I had when I saw this post the other day was from my belly.


But I had the time to reflect: to me, LotR is a masterpiece, but it has also a strong “personality”. It’s not an average story; you may like it or not for specific reasons.

Imagine to be the person in charge of selecting the best books. Something like this arrives, you read it and you like it. But its personality is very strong, and your role requires you to be cold and professional.

Today I can read these words and think that the decision maker made a mistake. But then I put myself in their shoes and it’s hard to make a decision with something like Tolkien’s book. A modern Tolkien can write tales in smaller formats on platforms like Substack. With nobody predicting if the text could be right for a specific geography.

It happens also with video games, I have to say especially to us game designers. Part of our responsibility is to pitch new ideas for features and mechanics. All companies have people in charge that filter our proposals. This process filters also good things out, it’s part of the game.

To design and produce you often need a sort of authorization from people in charge. These people, like you, make mistakes. The lesson you take can be that this is unacceptable, but often it’s a matter of communication. If something so special like The Lord of The Rings arrives on your desk, you can make errors. That’s why people that get a proposal should be prepared first.

I don’t know the full story, maybe the Tolkien’s agent just sent the book with a note. When you present something, the receivers should know all that from before. In that way, they will feel already connected and familiar to the thing.

Like new writers on Substack, leave crumbs and taste the environment!

Can I be more productive with AI?

Published by Paolo on 31/12/2024

I own my way of doing things. With time, I got to believe in the power of patience for creative work. Ideas have to rest, somehow. Decisions must have taken at their own pace. Often, you take many micro-decisions in a couple of hours. Other times you need a week, or two, to get that “eureka” moment.

If you leave this part to anyone, or anything, you are missing the chance of connect things yourself. If you skip the writing of a huge, complete GDD with all your notes, you risk to get lost along the way.

You need to be a strategic thinker, and for that you need to have very clear the system.

“so, it’s a no?”

It’s a “it depends”. I started using Claude AI only on my personal project, the indie action sandbox Pawtners Case. I am developing it outsourcing Unreal Engine development, Art and first level design. And I am doing this in my way, I have no boss, no publisher, nobody supporting economically the project apart from me.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a project proposal that I still have to share with the team. Big docs are not meant to be shared with programmers and “hey, have a read”. Nobody will, it doesn’t matter if you’re a great entertainer or a poor writer. Still, they are very important for ourselves!

(with “big” I mean “more than 5 pages”)

Now that I got a couple of features and prototypes ready, I feel the need to share it. That is because now I see that they are involved. They need to know more. Before they were just following the lead of their client. Now they are part of this, for real.

So I asked Claude AI to review my document and find me possible areas that could need more detail. And I have to say that I am pretty happy with the result. The software is aware to be a software and it provided me a concise list of things. Many of them are not meant to be in a game proposal to me, so I discarded them. There are two of twenty points, though, that made me thing of small edits here and there.

I could have hired a freelancer to make the same work, but it’s hard to find the right person. I can clearly see the value here. Maybe those 2 points would have been reasons of discussions with the team. And that is valuable too.

I did the job first, and this software helped me with its editing. I am in control of the thing, I am not spinning a wheel and see what it spits out. I am the person in charge all the time. I see value in that.