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Tag: professional

The art of Prototyping

Published by Paolo on 13/05/2022

At the beginning of each game project there is a prototyping phase. Prototypes help teams to agree on a vision, to have something concrete to discuss. Deciding what goes into a prototype is a matter of experience and, I would say, an art in itself!

In most cases, an exciting idea leads a group of people to want to quickly create something well done. The final prototype then focuses on proving a thesis. 

I believe that a football game where the players are books works: we immediately create the typical mechanics of a football game and, instead of the players, we put books on it. It will be awesome.

There are also cases in which a prototype serves to demonstrate what is wrong with the idea. Some skilled designers manage to use prototypes to undermine their assumptions. It is a work of self-criticism, of searching for weak points. It rarely happens in companies, but it happens in independent projects. And it may lead to something truly unique. 

Returning to the example, I believe that a football game where the players are the books works. I created a prototype centred on how silly this concept of books playing football is. I don't devote myself to creating the mechanics of a soccer game, I am dedicated to creating the nastiest version of a book by running with a ball.

And very often, magic happens!

Whichever method you use, the important thing is to establish clear and measurable objectives, and be ready to discard the prototypes if they have not all been satisfied.

I assure you that more than one frustration is avoided!

Homa Games and Popcore cherry picking in Spain

Published by Paolo on 12/05/2022

I notice that the companies Homa Games and Popcore are recruiting many talents who have worked for years in large multinationals. Especially people from King and Scopely are migrating massively there.

If these corporations stopped inventing job titles to try to gratify their most bored staff.
And maybe stopped sending unnecessary technical tests to candidates and focused on finding and growing their talent.
And if they published the salaries with their job offers, to prove that they really are the professional organisation they claim to be.
If they stopped thinking about growth in the early stages of pre-production and focused on finding new winning formulas.

If all of this were satisfied, I’m sure, people wouldn’t move from there! The salaries are good, the colleagues certainly smart and experienced.

When I see so many people migrating to unknown companies, the conclusion I have is clear.

Study of Soda Supreme

Published by Paolo on 09/05/2022

Last week I saw a post from some LinkedIn influencer regarding a new liveops from King’s Candy Crush Soda Saga.

When I read the description, I decided to study this feature. In fact, as you can see from the announcement on the game’s official forum, the Soda Supreme feature proposal seems heavily based on monetization:

happy language to announce a disaster

Comments to the feature seem to go into one main direction. Obviously the volumes of people playing these games are huge. The majority is silent and we do not know if it has given good or bad results. As a game designer, I just try to understand the vision behind this, willing to learn from the masters of free-to-play.

That Bricorn may be right!

Then I downloaded the game again and tested the feature out:

I always record my gameplays on my channel (no commentary)

Goals and KPIs

When the Player runs the app, after a second a new screen will appear:

Sorry for the “Screen Recorder” thing on top

The pitch is quite clear: you get rewarded by spending gold bars. The fact that you are using the premium currency is reinforced by a new rewards layer.

Who is the real target of this feature? Payers: Players who use gold bars regurarly during their game sessions.

Probably, the team wants to improve the Gold Bars spending across the game. It will improve ARPDAU, average revenue per daily active user, since it is a time based feature.

Rewards are boosters, power-ups and lives:

the last tier is also the strongest one

There are 20 tiers of rewards. The higher the tier, the better the rewards. Rewards help you beat new games, so that if you spend gold bars you’ll probably beat more levels.

A secondary goal for the feature is probably to improve the engagement with the game. Engagement to me is: session length (minutes) and average sessions per day.

Feature Onboarding

The onboarding is heavily text based
  • The game matches you with a tier, according to your spending rate (I suppose).
  • The promise is to earn 1 special tile booster. I can make that simply by playing!
  • I have 42 hours total to pass to the next tier, otherwise my bar will reset. So that they are definitely looking for more sessions per day and more trials.

I am not sure that is the best way to explain the feature. First of all, I would introduce it starting from the first time the Player spends and/or needs gold bar. Second, the first reward is something I can create by matching 4 tiles in vertical. It would be better having more succulent rewards on lower tiers to foster the will to continue purchasing gold bars also for Players who doesn’t spend too much.

How will I improve this feature?

Candy Crush Soda Saga is an arcade version of the classic Candy Crush Saga. The levels are more blasty and also the challenge is designed for quick results (successes or failures). It’s fast, it’s for the younger cohorts of CCS Players and it has many game modes. The Player has always something to do.

Match-3 games monetize by removing pain points and by adding an interesting layer of strategy. A large part of the Players pay to be able to pass a level in which they are stuck.

  • Pain Point: You have run out of movements, but if you buy 5 more you can beat this!
  • Strategy: You may want to buy a booster to free up some areas on a complicated board.

In Candy Crush Soda Saga gold bars can be bought or won in certain situations. They are a soft currency, so that they are subject to inflation. Which is part of the reason why is very hard to scale those games.

The true potential of Soda Supreme

It would be great to adapt this feature to a ticket system for special levels. You spend gold bars and you earn tiers of special set of levels which give you extra rewards. That would be more meaningful and would probably create a better impact on the game’s community!

Anyway I found this feature really interesting, because it has the courage of taking the monetization directly! We should never forget, anyway, that rewards are great to reinforce successes. They works better as surprises and as the result of a concrete demonstration of skills from the Players. Spending gold bars can give access to new pieces of content, instead, and that would be way more meaningful in my humble opinion!

Game design consultants: hire who’s better than you

Published by Paolo on 05/05/2022

Some time ago I tried an experiment. I hired some people to try to teach them my way of making video games. My goal was not to earn money with those games. I wanted to train a couple of assistants because the number of clients of my consultings is increasing.

The experiment did not go as expected. My time is scarce, so I can’t invest it in training people. I quickly realized my choice was pretty dumb. However, I realized something very important.

If we don’t have time, it is better to delegate to those who know more than us. We will thus make a good impression on our clients. We will also learn new techniques.

Everything a Game Designer must know

Published by Paolo on 27/04/2022

A LinkedIn contact shared a mind map that summarises, from his point of view, everything a game designer needs to know.

Link to the original post

His post was shared and appreciated by many professionals in the sector.

In my opinion, instead, the image is misleading. It just looks at one part of game development: free-to-play business. Free-to-play is only part of a very complex world ranging from board games to virtual reality. I know many people in Europe who are dedicated to the development of indie games and I can assure you that, for example, the “Data” part is ignored by them.

This mind map contains what free-to-play game companies expect from a game designer. Which is very different from the declared purpose.

A person with in-depth knowledge in all of these areas is very likely to feel the work of a game designer frustrating. If I know the game-as-a-service business like the back of my hand, I will continually make proposals that probably won’t be heard. Frustration leads many game designers to jump to other roles, such as product management. Pure game designers, instead, are dedicated to something else!

When you work in free-to-play you gain knowledge in all these areas, but a game designer who does his job well devotes himself to two main activities:

  1. Facilitate tools in the team to decide how the game works
  2. Involve the people who will be playing the games in the process

Facilitate game design tools

The game designers are those who help define:

  • the game systems
  • the way in which the story reaches the players
  • the experience in the game levels
  • the actions necessary to activate the mechanics.

System design, narrative design, level design and gameplay design. In the case of free-to-play: economy design, content design, level design and UX design.

It is good to know the business side and the data side to be informed about what to do, but it is very important to be able to realise the very experience you want to offer people in the game. The necessary qualities are of a technical, artistic and editorial nature.

  1. Create and use spreadsheets, touch JSON files and game engines (technical).
  2. Set up a process, help define the essence of your experience and study well the armony of all the elements of your game (artistic).
  3. Document everything and write stories both for internal inspiration and for the Players (editorial).

Involve people

Too often, busy with many daily tasks, team members forget the main component of a commercial video game: the Players.

Most video games in production will not be commercially successful for exactly this reason. The task of game designers is to involve real people constantly to test the assumptions you have about the players and the market. A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. You need to go outside, watch people play the game and have meaningful conversations with them.

Product managers, programmers and artists don’t have the time to do this. It is up to the game designers to take care of this. If you don’t, the work comes down to constant deliveries over long periods of time and then comes to nothing. It happens very often.

Conclusion

Game design is a very complex activity, but the role of game designers is very practical and creative. It is about analysing the games and helping the team to define the tools to create the game. Then you will create gaming experiences using these tools.

It is good to know a little bit of everything. Of course, if you want to have a meaningful discussion with a product manager you should speak the language of the business. If, on the other hand, you want to have a conversation with the art director, learning about the history of art and the theory of colours can help you a lot.

But let’s never forget the fundamentals. We game designers do a very practical job!

Player’s Advocate

Published by Paolo on 22/04/2022

The other day I was talking to a colleague. He tells me “you don’t have to worry about the decisions that come up, just think about doing your job. What they tell you to do. “. This for me is the best way to have mediocre products, designed for mediocre people with something to spend. Do your job right, just do what they tell you to do.

Game designers very often are exactly like that. True game design includes, instead, keeping promises to players. Game designers connect with players’ fantasies and offer them the experience they are looking for.

Game designers understand that a “daily bonus” is not gameplay, but simply a feature. They understand this and struggle to pass this concept on to those above as well. If your game as a service has been releasing only features and not gameplay for months, guess what: you have a problem!

If you are this type of designer, you quickly realize that the most important thing in your job is to make sure you create great products and services. Because a game is a language to tell a story. And this story must be true.

Your job is to get people to work on publishing a great game. Not garbage. No shortcuts.

If you are not the Player’s Advocate who will be?

Can Netflix, SONY and Microsoft integrate ad networks in the future?

Published by Paolo on 21/04/2022

Apple and Google have made marketers’ lives more difficult. Today, it is harder for a game to reach the right audience only through ad campaigns on the major networks that offer this service.

Acquiring new players is more expensive and often ad campaings bring people with different motivations to play.

This week’s news is that Netflix is ​​considering introducing ads to its platform. SONY and Microsoft, which are activating their subscription services, are also seriously considering introducing ads to their games.

New ad networks will be created. Someone calls them “content fortresses”. If these companies play their cards right, companies will certainly be pushed to invest in acquisitions directly on these platforms.

The more you know about people’s actions in other products, the easier it is to reach them. The ads that appear to these people will be more meaningful to them. People who enter a game are likely to be more drawn to the core features and mechanics.

Netflix, SONY and Microsoft can score a big win if they play their cards well. As designers, ads are an interesting tool to get better monetization numbers simply improving the reward ratios.

Pareto principle in videogames conception

Published by Paolo on 28/02/2022

The basic use of the 80-20 rule (Pareto’s principle) in video games is to copy the 80% of a successful or promising game in order to mitigate some of the risks involved in investing time, effort and money in developing it.

Then you have 20% of freedom, where you can put your own secret sauce to the cake.

The risks of this approach come when you do not understand WHY a certain competitor works out there. It may be a successful marketing case. Maybe a special UX is what makes it great. A great level or narrative design may be making the difference. Hard to tell if you do not know basically three things:

The first thing is to deconstruct competitors,

The second thing is to run playtests with competitors games,

The third thing is to study the audience of competitors in a meaningful way.

Be ready for no-internet scenarios

Published by Paolo on 25/02/2022

In my dayjob I use a lot: Google Suite, Unity3D, Python, Github (and git in general) and a bunch of tools more such Slack, Discord or Machinations.

I work into the cloud, so that every document and every simulation or concept or prototype I produce is instantly available from everywhere.

Those are strange times, anyway. We cannot take the Internet for granted forever.

What if tomorrow you cannot access to the GDD you were workin on? What if you cannot pull the last commit from your devs? Can you work offline for, let’s say, a week?

Probably it’s time to return back to the Office Suite too…

My thoughts on seniority

Published by Paolo on 22/02/2022

I was talking to a friend and game designer about the future and our wishes. Sometimes I would like to dedicate to projects of a different nature than mobile f2p. Sometimes I would also appreciate to have different kinds of responsibilities.

Companies see my profile and normally contact me for:

  • virtual economies
  • tutorials and first time user experiences
  • game design documents for free-to-play mobile games
  • creative direction

I would love to be able to dedicate a couple of years to an action RPG for PC and Consoles at some point. Maybe I can be very useful in the level design of a moment-to-moment adventure games of the caliber of The Last of Us. I am absolutely convinced of it, even if companies of this type when my resume arrives they discard it in a few minutes.

“You should then start as a junior designer in a new reality if you want to do this. Difficult to be a senior designer there.“, my friend pointed out.

I disagree with this. For me, seniority does not depend on concrete experience in a specific type of game.

What it takes to be a good game designer

Raph Koster says that a designer must express quality in three fundamental fields: artistic, technical and editorial.

The artistic side is essential to have that sensitivity to observe what players are looking for in a certain type of game and offer them an experience that in terms of aesthetics and challenge makes sense. The game designer is a bit of an artist: is the game imitating real life, or do you want to create a game that influences real life in some way?

The ability to write is also very important, especially being concise. I believe that the best designers use the formula 60-30-10 when presenting their ideas: 60% images, 30% text and 10% multimedia references. 30% text therefore needs to hit the spot and inspire. For that you need experience and editorial skills. I’m not even an English native speaker, so I have to constantly update myself on this point.

Finally, there are the technical skills. Using a game engine, knowing how to use spreadsheets and other skills that vary depending on the designer. Personally I am proficient with Unity and Python and I create scripts that often make things easier for me and the team. Others are very good at photoshop and can also create basic concept art. Some level designers come from architecture and therefore are quite more comfortable creating structures that make sense. All technical skills can be learned, however. In fact, in 3-6 months at the most, it is possible to enter a new world and acquire what we need to be fully operational.

What is seniority to me

Senior game designers are people capable of understanding the context in which they move, constructively stimulating dialogues and setting up processes according to the project they are in. They are very aware of the gaming business, too.

While I’ve contributed to various virtual economies, that doesn’t mean an AAA game designer isn’t capable of studying competitors and preparing mathematical models and spreadsheets. These are things that can be easily learned. The design process has stages that are independent of the platform, genre and type of audience. It is a question of understanding which problems must be solved, analyzing how other realities have faced the same problems and defining solutions according to a certain context (team, budget, scope, time and quality).

Seniority is primarily dependent on age, in my humble opinion. When I read “senior game designer” and I see an age under 25 I already start to have suspicions. Being senior also gives you the self-confidence necessary to defend designs with superiors. Except in special cases, if you are 22 it is difficult to overcome certain filters set by the experience of 40+ years old leaders.

Age, previous experience and context make the seniority, for me. Having faced the same kind of problems in the past certainly accelerates, but it doesn’t make the difference between junior and senior. You can be slower at start but way more effective on the long term.