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Tag: research

The future of game design: Accessibility

Published by Paolo on 17/05/2022

All around the World, everyday hundreds of people publish their games on virtual stores. The efforts required to get the attention of the players are enormous. Apple’s new policies regarding player privacy only make this situation worse. The costs of acquisition campaigns are increasing dramatically and it is increasingly difficult to find people who like your type of game.

Look at that copy: nobody will accept to be “tracked”. It’s survivorship!

If we then consider that a substantial percentage of these people have hearing, vision and / or mobility problems, we risk wasting money by acquiring people who will never be able to play our game even if they want to.

There is one thing I have learned in recent years in industry: the development of a game compared to the marketing of the same is cheap. It is less risky to develop a good game, because then the benefits are seen in the announcement phase of the game.
I therefore believe that accessibility features will be increasingly needed in the games of the future, regardless of the platform.

Product lifecycle impacts marketing directly. Source: https://marketing-insider.eu/characteristics-of-the-product-life-cycle-stages/

Reasons

The first reason, as we have said, is the increase in the player base.

In order to improve your sales, make beautiful games that everyone can pick and play despite of physical and mental challenges.

The Last of Us 2 true innovation wasn’t about gameplay. It was about Accessibility.

The second reason is that accessibility allows for better games. Games with friendly interfaces, which perhaps allow you to customize the experience according to the type of player and his physical characteristics. Let’s face it: now a lot has been done in terms of creativity. There are games that metaphorize all kinds of experiences and contexts. There is still room for innovation, but few things are more important than accessibility.

Where to start

For me, a good design process always starts with a diagnosis.

A sincere diagnosis that asks questions and generates hypotheses on which the team can feel motivated to collaborate. Microsoft on its site dedicated to accessibility asks the following questions:

Can you complete the game using a single hand?

Would an average person be able to pick the game up and play?

Can you effectively play the game on a small monitor or TV sitting at a distance?

Do you support more than one type of input device that can be used to play through the entire game?

Can you play the game with sound muted?

Can you play the game with your monitor set to black and white?

When you load your last saved game after a month, can you easily figure out where you are in the game and know what you need to do in order to progress?

Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/gaming/accessibility-for-games

Here, this seems to me an excellent basis to start discussing this important feature that will significantly impact the future of games.

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!

Last post on crypto games

Published by Paolo on 06/05/2022

After many months studying and deepening these technologies in detail, I have come to an important conclusion. The video game industry deserves to broaden the audience and encourage access to more people. We don’t have to shrink if we want to grow.

Crypto technology was developed with the sole objective of evading controls of banks and states on the circulation of value.

There is an attempt to force these technologies into video games, as video games have demonstrated their ability to attract people’s attention.

These technologies are not necessary in video games. The video games are necessary for these technologies!

All implementations are solutions designed for nonexistent problems. We don’t need this bullcrap in our industry.

I understand that there are a lot of investments. We are facing another fever for the novelty. But we are because people, especially those who move money, do not delve into the history of the video game. All significant revolutions have resulted in a broader audience and a significant improvement in accessibility.

These crypto-bullshits, on the other hand, unnecessarily complicate things to create pyramid schemes designed for people who get drawn into these traps!

Art explains tech trends today

Published by Paolo on 21/02/2022

Is video game art for you? For me it is. What is the result of human creative work and comes to attract the attention of other people can be defined as art.

If the video game is art, it is interesting to study the history of art to understand many of its facets. Part of the history of art is the time when living artists realized that they could have very large profits from a simple certificate of originality of an artistic work.

Which explains a lot of the NFT movement that has fully invested the video game in recent months.

This reporter explains it better than me. Enjoy it.

If a videogame is a piece of art, instead of creating multiple NFTs why not embed your whole masterpiece in a single NFT?

Vampire Survivors – Small game, well made

Published by Paolo on 11/02/2022

I am completely engaged to Vampire Survivors. Made by few people, it’s a game about power creep. I am totally engaged. Here my last gameplay:

The goal is to collect experience and level up, becoming stronger and unlocking new characters and scenarios.

Tower of Wants

  • I want to kill monsters to get experience
  • I want to get experience to unlock the next power
  • I want to unlock the next power so that I can survive more time
  • I want to survive more time to get more gold
  • I want to get more gold to unlock more characters
  • I want more characters to have new play styles
  • I want new play styles to unlock more achievements
  • I want to unlock more achievements to complete the game

It’s a simple idea, built around a retro theme (Castelvania). I admire people who build this kind of things. It is so smart and make me always thing: why didn’t I made this?

Clash of Clans notes on tutorial

Published by Paolo on 29/01/2022

Read the first part of the analysis here.

In this second part I want to write on what I experienced personally during the tutorial experience. It is very important to write down notes for a game designer.

If you have no time for that, you have no time to learn.

The game welcomes you with the main view of the Village. Here the Player can already decide “this is my kind of game” or quit. The welcome is given by the Villager, one of the two characters introduced in the tutorial. The girl has changed visually:

Her expressivity has become more exaggerated and her proportions are nearest to the beauty standards. I preferred the old one, since she reminded me more of a tough and rude viking. But I get why this one was selected: especially on a small screen you need to emphasize gestures and expressions.

The first mechanic is introduced. The tutorial makes you build a cannon to defend from a goblins’ raid. The sequence is pretty memorable. The goblin is fun and informal, but uses sophisticated words and spells correctly. The animation after the build, which is an idle mechanic with its rewards per se in the game. The defense mechanic is not completely introduced to the Players. Players will learn it alone later simply by playing and discovering they can tap on graves to earn some extra elixirs. Which is pretty smart!

Just after, the Player learns the attack feature and all of its mechanics. A group of 5 wizards join your village and you can use them to get revenge with the goblins. First of all, I believe that wizards are chosen because they are narratively meaningful. In fact the Villager has explained that your village is built on a Ley Line, so that your buildings will auto-repair. Magic is on the air. Second, wizards are pretty fast destroying buildings which is great to keep the tutorial shorter. Last, wizards are a kind of troops that a Player can unlock later in the game. So that the Players can get a hint of future unlocks and test two troops during the tutorial (later, they will use the barbarians).

Read the historic deconstruction made by Deconstructor of Fun here

The third part of the tutorial puts its focus on the importance of building and improving your village. I believe that the Developers, after giving an hint on the possible thrills and best moments, considered proper for the Players to really learn the core loop deeply. The Player builds 5 important resources, completing the core loop five times. It is more than enough to learn the basics of the game. 

The tone of the Villager is very formal, and that is when I want to work for personal exercise the next few days. I believe that this part hasn’t aged well and I would like to improve it as an exercise. Many clones of this fantastic game popped out and also many evolutions are at the door. The next successful game can be possibly based on this masterpiece. Especially for new players, I believe that the Villager is a character which should have a more relatable personality. Messy, complicated and interesting. Just like people in real life!

The 2022 tutorial ends with one of the newest features of the game: challenges and rewards. The overview is too fast and based on skipping dialogues, more than actually learning something meaningful like in the first part. Which makes the tutorial experience ending with many questions. This can be interesting for newbie Players, especially for the most hardcore part of the audience that can perceive suddenly that this game is not linear but deep.

When the Players return into the SHOP section, they will find the first offer which is the third builder. No pop-up, no constant prompts looking for no-brain conversions. The value is there. During the tutorial you entered the SHOP enough times and now you know that the SHOP is critical to the experience. You will find the offer and, if you want, you will convert. That is what I call: treating Players with respect.

Clash of Clans tutorial anatomy

Published by Paolo on 28/01/2022

This weekend I want to do an experiment, the first series of articles. This one is dedicated to one of my favorite games of all the times: Clash of Clans. The purpose of this post is to share my way of breaking down the tutorials of the games I play.

Being scrappy is OK

There is a simple process you can follow, it takes a work day more or less:

  • Play the game recording the session
  • Create the brickfile for the Tutorial
  • Use a spreadsheet to dissect everything

The result is something like this

You can see the google sheet here and make your copy if you want.

  • The first two columns are the report of every dialogue step by step
  • Then I detail the feature (or mechanic) the game wants to teach every step and the action needed to pass to the next step
  • I take notes on narrative. The character speaking and the word count are important for the translation budget. The dimension of every script, in fact, depends directly on the number of characters speaking and the locations used. You can check out this masterclass on short stories.
  • Finally, I put my bias into commenting on the narrative, assigning an intensity score to every beat and focusing on the tone. For reference, I left the list of tones in a separate tab. The list is taken from this article.

Intensity score goes from 1 to 5, and:

  1. Already seen, not exciting
  2. New thing on screen, still not exciting
  3. Interesting
  4. Cool surprise
  5. Thrill

It is just a personal valuation useful to me to see where I would like to improve the things!

Look mama: I’m in the metaverse!

Published by Paolo on 26/01/2022

I am looking to move the first step on the concept of metaverse. So that I:

  • Created an avatar on Ready Player Me. It is a new standard proposal for open avatars. Pretty cool!
  • Downloaded on Steam the application Animaze
  • Imported the Ready Player Me avatar into Animaze
  • Used OBS Studio to put the Animaze avatar with green screen on the final video
  • Recorded a 4 minutes video with my early exploration in CYBR

Here it is the result:

How to deconstruct a game

Published by Paolo on 10/12/2021

One of the skills that make a game designer instantly hireable is the deconstruction of games. It is no easy task to complete, since the first instinct is to end the job once we have identified the core loop, the secondary loop and maybe some unique feature.

I have seen too many times teams copying from here and there after a quick deconstruction and the result is something like

Not cool huh?

A good deconstruction looks for the audiences of some game and wants to really empathize. Having a document with the core features is nice, but having empathy maps, customer journeys and personas at the end of it is key for the success of a project.

  • Play the game for the right amount of time
  • Look for its update logs: you need to know where developers put the highest efforts
  • Read reviews and study them
  • Look for streamers, those are free playtests
  • Join Discord channels and Reddits to spot the interesting and pain points
  • Run playtests of your competitorsTry to interview core Players

With all those insights, build your Player. Forget demographics, focus on behaviors and needs!

I played: Merge Animals 3D

Published by Paolo on 29/11/2021

The thing I like the most about the hypercasual trend is that I really cannot deeply understand why all of this works. My professional mind has collected a lot of assumptions regarding game design theories. So that I am constantly challenged when I see millions of people playing silly games. Fascinating!

Merge Animals 3D FTUE

This weekend I tried out Merge Animals 3D that is performing well on mobile phones. The concept is pretty cool. The game is about trying out different combinations of animal traits on a runner and see how they do perform on the track. The main character is a human anonymous mannequin. He is competing against two mannekins more, also them with random configurations. The camera is top-right and impedes having a clear view of what is coming, so that some reflexes are needed to overcome obstacles. Then you unlock a new animal trait which will permit to overcome other kind of obstacles.

There are five kind of possible traits to dominate with an animal prothesis: strength, water, climb, fly and run. I haven’t found much more. It is impossible to arrive the last, I have tried everything. If you don’t end the race first no worries: you will still pass to the next levels! No lose condition at all.

The colors and textures are completely plain, that suggests that the game works with the part of our thinking system which looks for immediacy. No complex thoughts involved at all. Classic for the hypercasual games!

The game monetises with ads. I am afraid there is too few challenge right now. Maybe developers are trying out the core loop and then they will iterate on that.

Merge Animals 3D Core Loop

After a while I found pretty frustrating having to choose manually the mutations I wanted to face the next “challenge”. A UX improvement would be in that sense.

There is nothing suggesting to the Player why is doing all of that. A narrative design improvement would probably include a level sequence or images unlock. You discovered a new animal trait? tell me something about that animal.

Levels have basically no challenge. In order to maintain that philosophy, a Level Design improvement would probably be including some bonus level where the Player could collect letters or other elements useful to unlock new mannequin skins, for instance.

The game system is super simple. For the System Design part I would probably try to find some idle mechanic for the levels. Leves are a rewarding moment and not a challenging one, as mentioned before. Probably the Players who stay more than 2 days would find fun having some automatic system where they can grind other elements related with experiments and merging.

You will find the brickfile on github, as usual.