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Tag: professional

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.

Nuances of play and personalized game design

Published by Paolo on 15/05/2024

A game designer thinks in the players, not in the game itself. The game is a medium to deliver a playful experience.

Every game designer has some extra to bring to the players. It can be a narrative quality or a special eye for the game feel. Maybe a good reading of spaces to design levels, or the special capacity to abstract in systems.

The first important thing is to get to know it with time. The second is that in game design everything is a system. The system thinking is critical.

When we design a game, though, we design for archetypes or personas. We design for some common denominator. And then the game arrives to real people, the Players. And everyone has their singularities.

It arrives with controls, interfaces, sounds, colors, perception load, and things that are experienced on a very personal level. Each one of us is different, so nuance makes all the difference.

What fascinates me about the clear trend of technology right now, not only LLMs, is the possibility of having a personal game designer for every player, somehow.

If we focus on the real job (system thinking with a personal extra approach) there is the chance to instruct a machine to deliver a personal experience.

Is the machine capable of changing the nuance to meet every single player’s needs?

Think simply in a level balance: too hard for Peter, too easy for Molly.

What if it can be adapted to offer the right challenge to everyone?

My feeling right now oscillates between negativity and positivity, don’t take me for a blind enthusiast.

When I read how the copyright has been assaulted to train certain models, I wanted to retire on a mountain and make offline indie games using VIM on Linux.

Still, the possibility of being capable of meeting each one of my player’s tastes is definitely exciting. Because, at the end of the day, that’s my duty as a game designer.

On sacrifice and duty

Published by Paolo on 10/05/2024

When you are an employee you are there because you can do the job. Also because you can make THAT specific job, you master certain pipelines according to your level of experience. Finally, you are there because you can work in a team.

When you build your own company, you are working on creating an environment that permits your employees to build a business.

When you are a freelancer, you have a 1-person business that helps clients (usually companies) solve specific problems.

The social media era, the dopamine times in which we live suggests us “not to work for other people’s dreams”. That’s a weird lens to use to see the World. We forget the importance of sacrifice and duty for our societies to prosper.

There are different sets of skills that you need according to what you want to do. It’s not easy for me to suggest “Hey, did you lose your job? You are an expert, why don’t you build your own company?”. The responsibilities you have to tackle are completely others, and your experience will probably give you also a lot of biases. And most importantly, you should focus on the business, not on the pipelines.

The odds for a specialist to be successful in a completely different field are higher than in building a business in the same sector. The games business is full of doctors who built successful companies.

Some game designers out there can help solve wicked problems, outside of games. At this moment we have quite a few of them. That’s my wish, honestly.

Small nuances in game design

Published by Paolo on 06/05/2024

I am playing Squad Busters intensively these days. Hopefully, this game will work because it contains many elements I have been working on with another project up to last year (under NDA).

I am glad when top developers make certain design choices that I proposed or I was guessing but I didn’t have enough time to complete. “Please, Paolo, focus on this other task” is a classic when I start insisting on some point. It’s like when a singer sings exactly your feelings. Satisfying!

But I was also thinking of something else. I was in the middle of an intense moment. A player with a squad better than mine was chasing me. I didn’t have enough coins to open the chest, so I used a booster to open it.

And it reminded me of a quote from J. Riccitiello: “When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you’re really not that price sensitive at that point in time”.

I remember that everyone hated that, the only difference was that Mr. R. was pitching a power-up instead of a booster.

(In the jargon adopted by the companies I have worked with, boosters are the ones you buy BEFORE a match, while you can get or create power-ups DURING the match)

The reality of things is that we like to win, as players. And we can also pay for that. I respect the choice of putting this element on a strategic level and not on a tactical one. The latter would have upset too many people.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see how a small nuance can make all the difference in game design. So that also a bad (in the sense of evil) idea can be played well if we have the right time and resources to work on it.

I completed my deck

Published by Paolo on 02/05/2024

Thanks to the help of two friends I have completed my deck to send as introduction to companies.

“Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are ‘costs’.”

(P. Drucker)

This is valid, to me, for every business, also small like mine. Over the last couple of years that I have dedicated to helping gaming companies with innovation, I had to learn a lot about marketing and innovate my business myself.

I could have gone easier with my proposal: “I make levels for your game”, “I write narratives for your game”, “I will fix your tutorials”, or “I will create FPS maps for your game”. But I am not a specialist! I have worked on so many projects that I consider myself skilled in starting them.

Do you need to lay down your vision for a new project? I am your man. My specialization is in innovation. As many game designers out there, the vast majority of games I have worked on were never published. This is the reality of our business.

I can predict lots of issues and tackle them before it’s too late. My analogy capacity make me create new things with few elements. And I touch everything: systems, gameplay, levels and narrative. I also build in engine.

Hypercasual was R&D with glamour

Published by Paolo on 24/04/2024

Now that the “hypercasual” word is not cool anymore, let’s talk about the benefits of R&D (which is a term for dinos, at this point).

Research and development in video games leads to the discovery of new technologies, mechanics, dynamics, and narratives. It is an activity that is hard to integrate within a business, especially in high-competitive environments.

I helped a couple of years a developer of hypercasual games and, in the end, to me, that was a little miracle. Why? Because for the first time in my career, I saw the fruit of R&D becoming an actual, shippable product. The CEO was happy, the developer was happy, and the marketer was happy.

Proposals were coming directly from publishers following trends, there were syntheses of popular indie and AAA gameplays. There was also heavy research on social/viral trends. I felt a volcano of ideas, that was a good period professionally speaking.

And it was because of the collision of 3 hacks: the CEO could save money thanks to the Unity Asset Store, developers could save time and the marketer could use concrete techniques to reach the hypercasual audience.

Many Players of hypercasual games were tech-savvy and very smart. They loved to find the flaws in these prototypes and they had fun in discovering how to become a “hacker”. They went very deep into the rules (which were the only elements well thought out) and they found a way of cracking them.

A breath of fresh air in a context where timers, special offers, and artificial scarcity were playing with their compulsivity!

Today the business model is gone, because it is not possible anymore to target directly these people with ads. It’s much more expensive to reach them so the little you make with ad monetization doesn’t cover the costs.

But these Players are still there, waiting for super innovative mechanics to break. Shipping “R&D games” every 2 weeks is still an available choice.

Happy World Book Day

Published by Paolo on 23/04/2024

Someone is claiming that AAA is dead when in fact is quite the opposite. AAA games are still driving the vast majority of revenue.

AAA development is struggling, though. I have never had the pleasure of working on a AAA game. That’s because every time I applied to an AAA company the answer was that my resume didn’t show AAA experience.

One of the good things about mobile free-to-play, instead, was the inclusion of professionals also from outside of the games industry. I had personally the pleasure of working with marketers, product managers, and UX designers coming from the world of apps, fintech, and so on. That created an explosive new opportunity where also AAA professionals come to work.

Endogamy creates struggles. Specialization is good also because it opens the opportunity for generalists, people with broader knowledge, to enter into the “game” and create disruption. Why are we often closing those new windows?

AAA development is struggling with endogamy, in my humble opinion. And mobile f2p is starting to follow the trend, too. When you have markets with high risks and high possible returns, often experience can be a setback. We need more opportunities for people with different backgrounds.

We need frogs that go deep, hedgehogs that go straight forward, but we also need birds that can see the horizon, and foxes who can spot different patterns in the forest.

A great book that demonstrates this thesis is “Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World”, by David Epstein.

Use analogies to find new formulas

Published by Paolo on 22/04/2024

Videogames are sold online and physically to people. Some game is not sold, it’s given for free. Virtual good inside of the game are sold. Video games are fully into capitalism. And capitalism has many characteristics, one of them is that it repeats itself a lot.

You see constantly new trends appearing from nowhere, completely unexpected. And then the system copies, reproduces, re-skins. That’s because of the fundaments of capitalism. And there is nothing we can do about it. It is what it is, so let’s just enjoy and observe it.

Or maybe you want to build something disruptive, something new. In that case you better look from outside of the core of your business, games in this case. With analogies you can find something maybe in sports, or maybe in shoes business that can be applied to videogames.

It’s like repeating in the capitalistic way, but repeating something that out of our system. Something that can become new.

Game design is facilitation not tactics

Published by Paolo on 10/04/2024

Game design is not a narrow world with stable structures. It is an activity where you cannot apply tactics and win the game somehow. You need to think broadly. You need to understand the culture and the past of the genre you are working on. You need basic psychology knowledge to understand human motivation.

That’s why it’s so hard to build and keep a video game company. The successful ones in the past managed to change things, reading the needs and the behaviors. Today you can recognize a bad company since the hiring process.

When a company sends you a technical test, they want to see if you know the formula. They have no time (they think they don’t) to interview you properly. To me, a designer needs to receive a technical test: but live!

That’s because game design is not about tactics. I mean, good game design. The issue is that when a company is led by business people, as it always happens, they look for formulas. They want to just express their vision and you, the designer, apply the right formula to move the project forward. And then the game reaches poor results, but it’s a market issue, Apple changed the rules, and so on.

Good game designers are professionals who know how to walk into the adventurous world of game development. We are facilitators, we facilitate the act of game design among a team. We want to change the culture, somehow.

When you call us just to make money, well… you get the kind of game designer that later in the career becomes a product manager. Nothing bad, of course, it’s just that I don’t fit in all this story.

Refusal as a generative act

Published by Paolo on 06/04/2024

Let’s talk about refusal as a generative act. The refusal has something similar to the design, to me. It identifies issues and creates new opportunities.

Right now in my industry, it’s a moment of change and challenges. Dramatic, somehow. But this is where things can change for the better. Refusal is a great tool we have.

I am reading on my feed dozens of posts written by people with huge experience who have been laid off. Now, these people are looking for work. It reminds me a little bit of the classic royal rumbles I watched on my television when I was a kid. Macho Man VS Hulk Hogan VS Ultimate Warrior… you get that! The most muscled guys in the world fake-fighting for a shiny belt.

Am I willing to join that? No, of course not! I can support this or that stunt, but I refuse to be in the ring. I am the guy with the big hand glove in the background, I love their spirit. But I am not joining that!

And this creates other opportunities for me. I work mostly with people who are starting to build new companies. People who are exploring a vision. There are lots of them, more than profitable companies for sure. There is a lot of work to do. And the more I help them, the more things I learn, the more I can help others.

And the best jobs I have had in my career, I mean full-time regular jobs, have started from this spark. Creativity, making games together. Not screening, filtering, testing, trying, questioning, and all these blockers.

That’s how, through the refusal of the standard processes, I keep and foster my passion for making games.

First screening with a web logical test? Not gonna happen. Unpaid home assignment? Not for me. More than 3 rounds of interviews? I am out.

Let’s meet for 2 hours in a room with a dashboard and a spreadsheet. Introduce me first to the producer and only at the end to the HR manager. Show me you’re looking for experience, design, and concreteness. Show me you want to make games.

I have created this post originally for LinkedIn. But then I removed it from there, because it can be read in wrong ways too.

Let’s talk about refusal as a generative act. The refusal has something similar to the design, to me. It identifies issues and creates new opportunities.

Right now in my industry, it’s a moment of change and challenges. Dramatic, somehow. But this is where things can change for the better. Refusal is a great tool we have.

I am reading on my feed dozens of posts written by people with huge experience who have been laid off. Now, these people are looking for work. It reminds me a little bit of the classic royal rumbles I watched on my television when I was a kid. Macho Man VS Hulk Hogan VS Ultimate Warrior… you get that! The most muscled guys in the world fake-fighting for a shiny belt.

Am I willing to join that? No, of course not! I can support this or that stunt, but I refuse to be in the ring. I am the guy with the big hand glove in the background, I love their spirit. But I am not joining that!

And this creates other opportunities for me. I work mostly with people who are starting to build new companies. People who are exploring a vision. There are lots of them, more than profitable companies for sure. There is a lot of work to do. And the more I help them, the more things I learn, the more I can help others.

And the best jobs I have had in my career, I mean full-time regular jobs, have started from this spark. Creativity, making games together. Not screening, filtering, testing, trying, questioning, and all these blockers.

That’s how, through the refusal of the standard processes, I keep and foster my passion for making games.

First screening with a web logical test? Not gonna happen. Unpaid home assignment? Not for me. More than 3 rounds of interviews? I am out.

Let’s meet for 2 hours in a room with a dashboard and a spreadsheet. Introduce me first to the producer and only at the end to the HR manager. Show me you’re looking for experience, design, and concreteness. Show me you want to make games.