You will likely work on a project that will not ship when you work for a company. If it ships, the odds say that the game will fail. If you and your team manage to get over the odds, it’s a little miracle.
The same thing is valid when you are on your own. You control the vision of your creation, but the numbers are there.
Are you working in games to be successful or are you doing it for the craft?
I am an avid podcast consumer. I love them, they are a bridge to knowledge that is hard to get otherwise. Through podcasts, I can listen the words of true experts. And for FREE.
As with everything in life, it comes with a cost. When I work on a project, I have clear references to consider. Often, those are words from experts that I got through a podcast. And, most of the time, those are words that stop some creative impulse.
It’s because podcasts are about things that already exist. Often, things that failed and why they failed. Sometimes, experts are not actual doers, but just analysts.
Discernment is a great quality to have for your creativity.
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!
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
For instance, in games like the last Supercell’s Squad Buster, you have a good balance:
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.