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Tag: professional

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.

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.