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Paolo's Blog Posts

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.

Hyper-casual is still an opportunity

Published by Paolo on 08/04/2024

The hyper-casual business model is dead, but I believe that hyper-casual games are still very attractive. The real challenge is to find a suitable model for these games with little friction and complexity.

During the golden years of hyper-casual, the gold rush pushed many people to forget the basics of game design. With a couple of clients, I have seen in first person the sloppiness of businesses in making games.

One game per week was the mantra. Just do it! Test the CPI. D1 retention is too low: out! Next one!

This is not how good games are made, of course. I believe that hyper-casual games met the need of lots of Players but then they didn’t understood them. The business model is dead because of this lack of empathy. This in the name of fast earnings.

False promises

The promise of hyper-casual was to have an instantly playable lightweight games. A snackable, high engaging experience based in low perception effort. This translates into a high retention at the start.

But then the games are filled with ads with no specific connection with the game itself. At the same time, the experience is not refined after the first days. The result is a drop in players. Imagine, you spent actual money to make the people install your game. And they go after a while.

Companies started to make everything to lower the acquisition cost and increase the ads seen per player. That was the first, and wrong, solution to the problem. The good approach, instead, would have been starting from understanding how to serve better the Players.

The second issue with hyper-casual games have been that they were very easy to clone. The mechanics were so simple to copy. Probably, a competitive advantage would have been to focus on mechanical friction hard to imitate. To make an example, souls-like games are hard to make. The same is valid for good match-3 games.

When a game is boring is because the mechanic has no deepness, or that its deepness has not been explored enough. This causes to the game to be repetitive, and so Players will quit.

The solution to this challenge is to start from the passion for games and social engagement that part of the hyper-casual players had. Look at this data:

You can see that Players are also playing more complex and online games. This is indicative that something can be done to properly serve them without treating them like ad-watchers, clockwork orange style.

Starting from where they love, the games they play and simplify them. Try to find the essence of battle royale, arcade, role playing games. That would have been a success.

  • Is it necessary to have a different character for every silly minigame? Maybe the Player can have a chosen group of avatars represented in different behaviors and mechanics.
  • Which mechanics from hardcore games can be synthesized in a simple game?
  • The game can open in more complex mechanics based on different frictions: start from the mechanical, but then add informational or strategic.

I used two old reports from Facebook and Pangle+Newzoo to make my reflections. Images are taken from there.

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.

The future of AAA

Published by Paolo on 05/04/2024

AAA is a marketing term. And what happens with marketing terms is that they are repeated so many times that they end up infecting also development. Expectations on AAA games are very high, in revenue and design terms.

To me, AAA means games with push-the-boundaries-high quality, extremely good game feel, and long duration. Two messages are spreading fast these days:

  1. 61% of PC/Console players choose 6+ years old games
  2. AAA development is too expensive and we need smaller games

Both messages are true, I guess. But you can read them also in a dangerous way. It’s a matter of “taste” somehow.

Small games are great. If I were to start a new company I would choose something small and grow from there. But video games are mediums not just to convey a story/experience. They are born to push the boundaries and show the technical capabilities of computers. For instance, I own a PS5 and I have zero games that are showing off its potential. Zero, probably the best game I have technically speaking is Horizon Forbidden West, and it was the first game I got with the console. I didn’t purchase a PS5 to play a JRPG made with RPG Maker, sorry about that.

People still buys high quality games

High-quality games have a market, players love games made with details and authorship. The issue lies more in our productivity as game makers since the overall software world is declining.

You should see this!

We should fight for more quality and more productivity, not less ambition. We should start from simpler abstractions because much knowledge is getting lost in the name of being “faster”. Faster doesn’t mean more productive, generally speaking.

  1. Players choose classics because of many factors. I identify 3 of them:
  2. Classics are highly available thanks to 2nd hand, massive discounts and subscription services
  3. Classics tend to have higher quality (in terms of software quality, less bugs) than new releases
  4. Also the game design slowed down in innovation, so that <GameTitle>7 is not that novel compared with <GameTitle>6. So, if <GameTitle>6 costs 10 euros and chapter 7 costs 70, guess what I’ll play?
  5. Over time, the familiarity with titles grows. We like something the more we see it.
  6. Improvements on technology have slowed down. A new title for PS5 is not that different from PS4 as it were between PS and SNES.
  7. The more games Players will have, the bigger chances to play old ones
  8. Game production has been affected by the post-COVID effect

I am positive, I believe we have all the tools to come out from the limbo. But we have to work on it, and maybe this crisis we are living in will bring good opportunities in this sense.

Useful innovations come from actual needs

Published by Paolo on 04/04/2024

Back in the days, balancing levels for a match-3 game worked, more or less, like this:

  1. you and 2-3 colleagues played like 10 times the same level writing down the number of movements
  2. at the end you had a spreadsheet containing something like “10% of times with 9”, “20% with 13”, …, “90% with 32”
  3. According to the difficulty curve, you put that number in. For example, you had an easy level, you wanted 90% of people to beat it, and you put 32 movements.
  4. the level was out, you received the actual data and made the right fixes integrated with the iteration on the progression curve (to adjust the churn).

Later in the years, this system has evolved with technology. So within the engine, you already had a tool that tracked the gameplay automatically and reported everything in the spreadsheet.

Nowadays, things are more advanced than that. Probably companies that have lots of data are capable, with machine learning, of predicting the curves in real-time while the level designer builds the game. I don’t know it, just speculating.

The same discourse is valid for game engines, if we look at the history of the most successful ones they were born to make concrete games. Today there are solutions to make any game.

What I want to say is that if we’re going to see some evolution in other technologies, for instance, dialogue systems for NPCs, these will come out of actual needs and creativity. It’s hard to design a revolutionary tech for a part of a game without having deep knowledge and a true necessity (apart from building and selling a business) behind it.

Tending your garden

Published by Paolo on 02/04/2024

The secret is not chasing butterflies. It’s tending the garden so that they come to you.

Mário Quintana

I read this quote in a newsletter and it made me think a lot about when I work to improve the sales of virtual goods in games. Marketers know that there are 3 steps behind every buy: trust, value, and pricing. Game design helps with the three when we are allowed to do so.

A game that sells virtual goods is like a garden or amusement park. People arrive, and some of them go away. Someone decides to pose on a flower, someone to someone decides to line up for an attraction. Game design helps serve all those people.

Trust > Value > Pricing

Trust means that Players believe in what your game (and your company) is. If they don’t believe you, they won’t listen to you. You build trust through consistency and honesty. First of all, game design helps identify the segments of Players. Then we help the Players understand the game mechanics, setting clear expectations.

Township was a pioneer in introducing the same minigames that the Players saw in the ads in the game itself. Massive success. Why? Because of trust.

Behind the value, there is time, which is the real currency Players invest in a game. Marketing is in the middle of a radical transformation. Advertising on social media and search engines is costly and ineffective. Game design will show who you are to the Players and what your game represents. The value of a virtual good comes from the reasons and emotions it evokes in Players.

I buy extra movements in a match-3 because I need just another swipe to beat the level (reason). I don’t want to restart, because maybe on the next try, I will perform worse (fear, emotion).

Pricing is something decided by other departments. By using design research we provide an analysis of the pricing of our competitors.

I explain this very briefly:

We start by identifying which elements of the game are related to time (remember? Time is the currency). Then find the resources derived from those. Study the Shop to find and calculate the price of everything. For some elements, you cannot calculate the direct value. Make estimations based on assumptions. Imagine you are a Player who wants to buy everything and calculate the spend depth of your game.

That’s how you care for your garden!

Job in games royal rumble

Published by Paolo on 01/04/2024

My LinkedIn feed is filled with people that lost their jobs and are asking for new opportunities. I am talking about, mostly, experienced people. People who worked on games I only dream at night. People much more experienced than the average.

All of these people will send resumes. Eventually, they will be contacted for a first screening. Then they will receive a technical test. Maybe they will have another interview with the hiring manager. And then the team. Sometimes, the CEO herself.

The next months will be a royal rumble and the best talents will face the odds. I feel that is smarter to think laterally, and avoid the battle completely.

The artistic science of game design

Published by Paolo on 29/03/2024

Yesterday I had an online discussion with a fellow designer that is following a trend. The trend is to think in game design as a mere science. Like you can be able to exactly structure and predict everything by using the right approach right from the start.

I listen to everyone and I respect this colleague, but to me great games are never made like this. Game design is not science, also if it uses a pseudo-scientist approach for some of its activities. Make an hypothesis and run experiments. But then, the theory (of fun) you get is constantly challenged by innovations.

To me, instead of make prediction, the best way to fix retention is to see back. To see what you did. You do this by:

  • Playtesting your game every day on your own, every week with your team, and at least every milestone with common people
  • Measure your results and work to improve them, without worrying too much about estimation
  • Learning from your mistakes, you will make a lot of them

This is how I educated myself as a game designer. Game design has also something in common with art, in the sense that you need to develop your taste, your craft and most importantly, your process.

Happy Easter, everybody!

If Elden Ring was mobile f2p

Published by Paolo on 28/03/2024

I am playing Elden Ring these days. At start, all I got was lots of frustration, but currently, I am using it to de-stress. I know I will die every few minutes, so who cares? I die and chill, surprisingly. Until I will get bored and move on.

I keep asking myself: how would a f2p Elden Ring work?

First of all, let’s make assumptions about you, the potential players. They like rich lore, beautiful weapons, and big monsters. You decide to play on mobile while watching a Netflix show. Scroll and swipe a mobile game, to get endorphins while doing something passive. You don’t need too much cognitive effort, but you would put the show on pause to make a meaningful choice.

Core loop

  • The discovery is the most relaxing part of Elden Ring. You can choose the direction you want to go and the map is huge. In case you find a site of grace, you can upgrade your character here.
  • The combat is too stressful for a mobile F2P game that wants to reach massive audiences. So what if you already know its outcome? You already know that in the next 3 fights, you will beat, beat, and die. Or, beat, random outcome (roll: beat or die), and die
  • The loot is key because you do not lose your inventory when you die (only your runes)
  • Death is the catharsis that lets you restart your discovery. You can choose to go retrieve your souls (at your own risk).

The long-term goal is to complete the adventure. The live operations should focus on adding more chapters, on one end. On the other, temporary events and special bosses to loot extra spells and swords.

The puzzle that brings you to return over and over lies in the choice of direction to take to discover and upgrade your Tarnished. You should engage with the community to find the right guidance, or you can decide to discover everything yourself.

Metagame

I like this idea of the Players already knowing that they will die. They can dedicate themselves to relaxing, exploring, and enjoying the combats. Combats should be automatic, the Player can choose the equipment.

The economy of the game should be around enemies, souls, stats, and equipment. You need souls to level up the stats. Stats are useful to use the equipment. The equipment is to beat the enemies. And the enemies give you souls.

Every part of the core loop should be monetizable. Discovery leans on energy systems. Combat has rolls and power-up opportunities. You can multiply the loot. Finally, death can be the occasion to recover the consumables you lost (energies, power-ups, …).

Zombie Lane: my initiation to free-to-play

Published by Paolo on 26/03/2024

These days I feel nostalgic. I was thinking about which game caught my interest for f2p games. In my case, it was a game called Zombie Lane for Facebook.

It was the early times of free-to-play, and the success of Farmville was already there. I was receiving everyday notifications to help my friends with their crops. This game looked like a satire of that fashion, in my eyes. I discovered it thanks to Marc, a colleague from Zitro. And the irony is that a few times later I ended up working for the company that developed that game, Digital Chocolate.

The core loop is quite simple:

  • You get a set of tasks to complete to advance throughout the story
  • Completing a task means using energies to perform certain actions which include: harvesting, building, crafting, and zombie elimination.
  • Every time you use energy to perform some action, you get XP to level up. Leveling up grants improving your maximum energies to be able to perform more and more.
  • When you complete a task, you unlock 1+ extra tasks and characters

The long-term goal is to complete the storyline, which is organized into tasks. You also have to design and maintain your place, as a mid-term goal. You need defending it from the zombies. When you are out of the game, zombies can destroy things.

The adventure-farm genre is really interesting because it involves economy and systems but also an intense dose of narrative. Zombie Lane had barks, dialogues, stories, animations, and enemies with meaning. It was a simple game, and I have a tremendous respect for that game.

Maybe now that Discord launched activities: the possibility of making games for its vocal, it would be cool to recreate a game like zombie-lane. Many Discord users of today were the Zombie Lane players of yesterday.

Fun fact, the game already had many mechanics (especially resources) that are still widely used today in video games. Another innovation could be to thing in other kind of currencies.

Image taken from here.