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Paolo's Blog Posts

Starting from UGC

Published by Paolo on 09/02/2024

Imagine you want to create a new team to develop video games. Imagine you have a team of veterans and people with less experience. One of the ways to start is Roblox or UEFN (Unreal Editor for Fortnite).

They are walled gardens but allow you not to worry too much about thinking about the game to develop. Roblox has more players than Playstation and Xbox combined. So there is a solid community of players.

When you start a new project by creating a team of people who don’t know each other, it’s a good idea to start doing smaller tests. So why not try these systems that already have their basis? In my opinion, it is an excellent opportunity to start.

Time for the underdogs

Published by Paolo on 08/02/2024

I am at Gamesforum, a conference on the marketing of games. Organizers gave me a free ticket and I have to say that is worth every single (and inexistent) penny.

The times are challenging for employees. We are seeing many layoffs, changes imposed by platform holders, and global insecurity. I met colleagues and I noticed that those who work as independent are younger than those who are working as employees. It’s crazy, right?

  • If you are on a successful project, it’s very hard to grow more and more. So the day job is gritty and the pressure is very high.
  • If you are on an unsuccessful project chances that you will be fired are high
  • If you are an underdog, there are lots of opportunities to grow! Many skilled professionals are available. Many known tactics for zero-to-one growth and you can probably create realistic plans.

What does it mean to be an underdog?

There are many acceptations to the term underdog, but to me it means:

  • small scopes, budget, team
  • ideas more focused on USP, both for product and for marketing
  • zero-to-one, still few partners/peers/providers
  • focus on the build, money will be a consequence

Why is it time for the underdogs?

Big players in the market are lost in the age of efficiency. After chasing impossible growth, they are now all-in for profit. They are reviving legacy products, and creating copycats, and they are not building anything new. Being an underdog now means being forced to think of alternatives to production and distribution strategies. It means to dream more and probably better. Who knows, maybe you will be the leader of the future!

Designing Journeys

Published by Paolo on 07/02/2024

I am designing the journey of a game for a client these days. It is a fun activity, also when you don’t have all the information you need to complete it. Anyway, it can be struggling, because it is very critical for the entire project.

A journey is the prediction of how the Players should behave in the game. At the same time, a journey imagines what the game offers to the Players, according to each stage they are in. When the journey is extremely detailed, usually you have a game with less freedom. The possibility space leaves fewer choices for the Players. When the journey is just sketched, you may oversee things too much.

General rules for journeys

  • Draft your journeys on a spreadsheet
  • The first column (or one of the first columns) should always be regarding the time
  • There should be some feature to represent the stage of the Players inside of the game. In many games it is level
  • You can briefly describe what the Players should do and the narrative around it given by the game
  • Each step should have its goals
  • Each goal should be reached using at least a single mechanic, or a combination of mechanics (skill atom). The key here is to always teach something. Remember: to have fun is to learn
  • You can define the challenges that the players will find over the journeys
  • Reaching each goal (every line/step of the journey) should unlock something meaningful for the next steps of the journey

It is hard to imagine exactly how the whole game should go. Especially with big games. Journeys are usually iterative, at the project start you have less definition and more questions. You can add those questions in a separate column. It is not necessary to balance at this stage, keep it clean and balance later. The last thing, journeys are very much needed also for simple puzzle games. In that case, we talk of the beat chart more than the journey.

When the junior is your client

Published by Paolo on 05/02/2024

When you gain some experience, you happen to work with junior profiles. They are people who need to grow and it takes considerable management and mentoring work. At first, you are inevitably slowed down, but then you see the benefits.

It then happens that you work for clients and your client is the junior. It explains badly, it defines things badly. In that case, you cannot treat him as you would treat a junior in the company, as a subordinate. And that’s great because it helps you understand how to treat people in the best way possible.

I understand a lot of things that I could have handled differently in the past. Considering a subordinate as the expert, which we are forced to do when working with a client, opens the door to many learnings.

Join the Scott Rogers Fundraiser Event

Published by Paolo on 02/02/2024

Scott Rogers, game designer, master and author of fantastic books needs some help. We are organizing a FREE online conference to raise funds for him.

You can join the conference here. It’s on Sat, February the 3rd. Event link here.

I will give a speech. From Books to Games: My Freelance Journey as a Self-Taught Game Designer

Years ago I had to create my opportunities in game design because the scene here in Barcelona was hard to navigate, to say the least. Thanks to books like “Level Up!” I managed to create my method of getting there. Tomorrow, I will share this method at the conference.

See you there!

Avoid the scarce mentality

Published by Paolo on 30/01/2024

Many talented people have been unfairly laid off. You can start thinking: “Hey, there are seniors from Blizzard open to work, they will never hire me. I am completing my engineering grade!”.

Let me tell you this is a fallacy. When we look at job openings we see very few positions for juniors or for people who didn’t work on a TOP game. Still, the possibilities are many.

The games industry is smaller than you think in number of people. But the games market is huge, opportunities are much more than you believe. Companies often don’t have to publish offers because internal employees know reliable people to hire.

You need to build!

Build your network, build your games, build your career. The job market is not meritocratic at all, it’s not the best that gets the job. The job market is a lot about being in the right place at the right time. Instead of spending your whole day doom-scrolling layoff news, build your future!

Please, stop it

Published by Paolo on 26/01/2024

People are complaining on a platform owned by Microsoft about the bad decisions that Microsoft made in many people’s lives. This is SO 2024, right?

We need to evolve as a collective. I don’t know the solution, but I think we should first state the problem well. It’s not a black-and-white situation. There are lots of nuances, posting a quote from Satoru Iwata doesn’t reveal the real problem.

The problem is not just greed. There is a whole situation to consider, we spent the last 3 decades experiencing dramatic shifts. It’s easy to lose the big picture. Easier to point the finger.

We need to evolve and think of new forms of collaboration, and different ways of financing projects. We need to improve our way of treating others like we are still doing.

The first step is to stop complaining, feeding the algorithms belonging to the same people that we are criticizing. That’s ridiculous, we are looking like the Pals! A clone of something already seen, now repurposed to serve as milking cows. Stop doing that!

Are you an artist or an entertainer?

Published by Paolo on 25/01/2024

There is a World crisis and our beloved games industry is not immune from that. 2024 just started and we are already seeing many people losing their jobs. Everyone is worried, someone wants to help with suggestions and experience.

One of the most common messages is “Have you lost your job? Build your own thing!”. I am not sure I agree with that statement. I have learned the hard way that you are either the artist or the entertainer.

In case you are an artist, you will tend to obsess with something. You can get lost in small details, but there is great news: you have the chance to become very wealthy. If you want to make money with games you should do your games.

In case you are (like myself) an entertainer, I am afraid that is better to work on projects made by others. Help them land down their visions. Facilitate the right tools to decide how the game will be. My bank account will never have seven figures like that, but hopefully, people will remember me as a great guy to work with.

Not any tips are good for us, the first thing is to understand who we are deeply. And to do that you need to try things out. Can I be an entertainer and an artist? Or, can I be 5 years an artist and 10 an entertainer? Who knows, maybe I can.

Portfolio for juniors

Published by Paolo on 24/01/2024

The other day a guy asked me: “Should I add game deconstructions to my portfolio?”. He is a student, willing to join a company as a junior tech designer. I said “no”, and I was not sure it was the right answer after all.

When a company looks for a junior designer, it is not to grow their talent and all that. They derive technical tasks for the juniors. The seniors can focus on things related to the vision and the design strategy, then. Imagine you are a recruiter or a manager looking at a portfolio. What do you focus on?

The answer is that you focus on the technical skills. You want to know if you can give technical tasks to them. You want to know if with them you will be able to focus on higher-level chores.

A portfolio should be concise and straight to the point. Show 3-5 projects focusing on very technical things when you are a junior. Leave the analysis and the breakdowns to senior professionals on their blogs. They do not have time to focus on tech stuff.

Answers that matter

Published by Paolo on 23/01/2024

Every time I say to someone that I design video games, the common question is this. “Can you show me the game you made?“. And my answer is that I can, but my games are not Mario or Quake.

this is one of the games I helped make. Probably the most successful one, for sure one of the dumbest

Others in this industry would give the same answer. It is what makes an industry, in the end. You don’t ask a car worker “Can you show me a car you made?“. The worker is one of the dozens who worked on a car. Still, you ask that to a game designer because we have this idea of a very personal thing. Which indeed is true, but reality is deeper than that.

The reality is that you hardly work on a project you love. And the few people who work on those projects are the ones that achieve recognition at a certain point. I mean, if they insist and persist in their goals.

I want to celebrate everyone that is building in this moment. Because you will be the future of the industry. You decide to build something in which you believe. You can be an indie or a new team inside of a big corporation. Many sides of an industry that permits different exits.

I cannot really show anything, because I have always worked on games belonging to ideas and vision which came from others. Maybe that is the right answer to the first question of this article.