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Tag: professional

Always keep making games!

Published by Paolo on 02/08/2024

I have just read a terrible article appeared on the website TheGamer.com. It’s terrible because it uses some of the issues we have in the games industry to create victims and entitlement among its readers.

I do not agree with this kind of messages because they use problems as an excuse to do nothing. It’s true that greed oftentimes invades the corporations, it’s the older story in the World. But this doesn’t invalidate our ambitions to work in an industry and build great games for the people.

I believe that nowadays we live in a big crisis. Plus the hyper connection in which we are installed make the bad news spread faster. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything is bad, that executives are bad people and we should not work to be their slaves. It’s simply not the truth, though.

The truth is that we are struggling with different challenges that inevitably influence also the games industry. And for that reason we should never complain and work hard. Always be creating. Someone will work for someone else. Others will work for themselves. Others will offer job to people. That’s how it goes.

Always be creating great games!

Indies and F2P

Published by Paolo on 20/06/2024

As a freelancer I work with many realities, but never AAA games. I work mostly with indies and free-to-play companies. I had some blockchain gigs, too. They paid very well even if the business was confusing, to say the least.

A significant difference between free-to-play companies and indies is their definition of success.

F2P CEOs are looking to solve a formula: CAC < LTV. Customer Acquisition Cost less than LifeTime Value. Indie founders, instead, want to be able to make another game. Everyone would like to become rich of course.

On one side we have people thinking of something scalable, on the other teams who want to continue making games. They both can learn a lot from each other.

  • The importance of thinking in a business
  • The importance of having the right KPIs to measure results
  • The importance of working on something you love.

Creating content

Published by Paolo on 12/06/2024

“The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.” (G. Orwell, 1984)

Videogames, like music, are perceived by some people working or investing in them as “content”. That’s where the very concept of creativity starts to be corrupted up to a level that is hard to answer quickly to some issue.

Creativity to me has more to do with removing things than adding. It’s like you throw the clay, or something like that, and then you start to dig material away from it.

Everyone who worked with me can confirm this, I start very ambitious and then I work shoulder by shoulder with engineers and artists to remove stuff. It’s better to have 1 thing well polished than 5 generic. It’s better to enhance a strong part of a game than to create a new mode to sustain the weakest ones.

The dopamine culture wants content, and it’s harder to see this simple truth.

World Tetris Day (the day after)

Published by Paolo on 07/06/2024

I just discovered that yesterday was the World Tetris Day. The history of Tetris is incredible, they made movies and documentaries on that.

I like to hear stories about game design as an invention. Most of the time we work with projects, not inventions. Inventions in creativity have the potential to create nostalgia.

I like vision statements like “games that will be remembered forever”. They mean to work to develop a market, not just saturate it to extract profit.

The day after World Tetris Day I wish you to invent something new.
Have a great weekend everybody!

The thing is alive!

Published by Paolo on 30/05/2024

Game design is the act of deciding how a game will be. The whole team designs the game, in the end. Every member puts its grain of salt. And then the game starts to drive the game design!

Game designers care about Players, as I said the other day. The game is a medium to realize a playful experience for them. The team builds the game brick by brick. And we play the build every day. It happens that the build itself starts to drive its iterations.

I am reading many analyses of the new game from Supercell. Many of those are written by consultants who have to sell their services. Which is good and healthy, I am a consultant too! I don’t consume all this free knowledge to know what to do. I study because it helps to improve my toolbox, not my choices.

Players, do not care about monetization flows and core loops. Players want a game on their phones fast and engaging when they feel stressed. Something that continues forever, they want to feel the sense of progress. Someone wants to connect with other people through a game.

Every tentative of building a game on best practices, breakdowns, and playbooks fails miserably. I have worked in the last 8 years on dozens of games and it’s always like that. Many business people would love to have an algorithm to create the best game, but it doesn’t exist.

The personality is impossible to imitate. There are companies built on imitation, and the result has always shown their personality. In game design, we need tools but we give our best when we work with what we truly, deeply love and understand. And that happens rarely, that’s probably the main challenge of our craft.

Games drive our work

Published by Paolo on 29/05/2024

I am reading breakdowns and opinions regarding the last game from Supercell, Squad Busters. I love to read those things, but the point of all that content (writing and video) is to sell the idea that something like that can be done following a concrete set of practices.

The real goal of the game design is to entertain people using a video game. A video game is an artifact made of technology and entertainment. When you and your team are working on a game, it’s the game itself that guides the whole thing.

You create a game one brick at a time, and you design its systems step-by-step. At some point, it becomes an entity that will inevitably drive your design choices. If the business side starts to impose the imitation of others, that’s a dead end sorry about that.

You can decide what the game should be about, of course. And it’s better to be something that comes from inside of you, somehow. You will not make the next Squad Busters, because you’re not Supercell.

It’s interesting to have a mental library of mechanisms and methods to work with. Your toolbox is important. But you need to put something truly out. There is no other way around, especially if you want to build something solid that lasts.

Nothing new can be predicted to be a success, you have to put yourself in it. And make the game drive your choices according to its evolution. In fact, following others using your intel will only drive you to failure.

SDT, Friction, Supercell

Published by Paolo on 27/05/2024

Self-determination theory is the single most common theory used in game design. There are lots of theories built on that, it’s simple to build new ones. Three is the perfect number, as always.

Games that offer good emergent gameplay have the right amount of friction in the 3 aspects correlated with self-determination theory components.

  • Mastery relates to mechanical friction, meaning the challenge imposed by the controls and the mechanics of the game.
  • Autonomy relates to strategic friction, meaning the challenge related to the decisions.
  • Relatedness relates to informational friction, the things you know about the game’s status.

For instance, in games like the last Supercell’s Squad Buster, you have a good balance:

  • The Player has to understand the combat system, know when to use the turbo (also in combat) and play with the action area to attack and escape at the right time
  • The Camera doesn’t permit you to see everyone, so you never know who you will meet. There is an information friction.
  • The re is a strategic friction related to the autonomy, you can decide to attack others or collect gems, but it’s up to you. Everything has a light consequence.

Content pipelines

Published by Paolo on 24/05/2024

When I design a game the tool I use the most is a spreadsheet. I use spreadsheets for predictions, calculations, but also to define the concrete experience step-by-step. And that leads always to tasks for artists and programmers.

The things you have to produce more often have a sequence of steps to be produced. That sequence is called content pipeline. Or at least, I call it like that.

Content pipelines can make or break your game. I think in FC games from EA Sports, they managed to sell cards. Which is great for content pipeline, cards are relatively easy to produce compared with 3D models and animations.

One of my responsibilities as a designer is to find the optimal content pipeline to satisfy the product thesis. It’s a team effort, an interesting problem to solve. But design plays a big part in that, because we are usually more aware of technicalities.

Onboarding and investments

Published by Paolo on 23/05/2024

I name the first session of a mobile game, the onboarding. This starts with the tutorial, which is part of the FTPE, first time player experience.

The onboarding is critical to retain Players. Especially in free-to-play games, the currency that Players will invest in a game is always their time. You will pay to get them and you should make them return. Your duty is to give them a good welcome.

This concept is widely used in the industry as a way to attract investments. You need to prove that your game retains the Players if you want to get your project funded. But there is a trap which is very easy to follow.

The trap is to focus too much on the onboarding leaving the real juice of the game aside.

In my experience, the games that retained the better on their first launch where the games where the onboarding wasn’t present at first. The onboarding design and implementation should come later, you need to first find the real essence of your game.

Using tricks to attract investment can be detrimental on the long term. Because you basically put the whole team on a treadmill, not focusing on the core experience.

Do you want to find the best core to retain? Find the core that works great also without FTPE.

The power of microculture

Published by Paolo on 20/05/2024

I am an optimist, and that doesn’t mean that “everything’s gonna be alright”. Being an optimist means having hope that my actions can lead to better results in the future.

In the last few years, I have been perceiving the development of two spaces in the games industry (and also in music and films).

The first is the space of big corporations and companies related to them; it’s the space where serious money flows. Where the top talent works. It’s the space that right now is struggling a lot.

The second are the solo developers, the small teams, and the people who serve the minimum viable audience. This space is the one that is growing right now.

Look at the good news of the last year and a half. More than 80% of them are about some project that seems to come out of the blue. And of course, it’s not the case. It’s just that until then we weren’t part of that small audience that was following the project for months and that creator(s) for years.

I went to Retrobarcelona yesterday, a local fair dedicated to the games that made me. Arcades, pinballs, classic consoles. Craftsmanship dedicated to the IPs that still make my heart beat. People with metal band t-shirts, and a better vocabulary than the average.

I spoke with friends making more money making games for SEGA Mega Drive than they made with Switch and PS4. I met a friend who is a brilliant marketing consultant for small teams with little budget. I assisted in 2 talks of local streamers with a strong, loyal, cultured audience. I purchased books from a guy who closed his retro games store during COVID and now writes short sci-fi stories, runs a podcast, and is making a game for Dreamcast.

These realities have become bigger in the last few years. The tools to grow are there and are free. Today it’s easier for one single guy to make everything needed to run a business.

Was the other side present too? I have met a couple of friends, with exceptional talents. They were working for some of the biggest brands that landed in “sunny Barcelona”. Or they were working for investor-backed startups with huge ambitions. They either lost or left their jobs.

I am aware that my perception can lead me to the wrong reading of things, but that’s my rant for today. There are opportunities for those who are not waiting to be picked. For those who don’t use the playbook.

It’s great to have a fancy title in a corporation that belongs to the macro-culture. I still dream about it on certain days. But belonging to the micro-culture, finding and serving that minimum viable audience, can be profitable. Reddit, Substack, Patreon, Kickstarter…

That can be exciting! Not easier, you have to work a lot on it. But a concrete possibility. Something that gives me hope, that makes me an optimist.