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Paolo's Blog Posts

Remote processes

Published by Paolo on 18/07/2022

I work remotely for companies since 2016, more or less. I am very specialized in game economies and UX, so that for them is easy to deal with my tasks and responsibilities.

Game development, instead, is never so easy. You cannot rely just on freelancers to build successful products that potentially may last years. You need a core team fully involved every day. And in order to keep it working properly, you need to set up the proper processes. Also the companies that state that they don’t believe in processes, end up setting up (scrappy) processes in the end. To me, it is better to embrace the process as part of the development. In my opinion, processes are very important.

In 2020 everything shifted online. Remote work was forced by the terrible situation of the pandemic. We had no time to prepare, we had to act fast. In a lot of cases, the same exact process employed before was translated to the asynchronous remote work. Some of the most “boring” things were also eliminated. In their place, nothing new was developed. The new process, then, was like Frankenstein.

Nowadays, many are arguing that we need to return to the office because is not the same online. They are right, online is not the same. But, are you sure you did your job, testing and iterating alternative processes?

The reality of giving games for free

Published by Paolo on 15/07/2022

You start a new project with your team, and you read that someone is getting rich with a f2p mobile game. There are people, called whales, that are willing to spend thousands of euros each month. You can be rich too! You have a great idea!

Then you find the right investors and you build your team. You study the market well, mitigate all risks and put your product in soft launch, after 2 years of development. Then you struggle with metrics. Day one, day seven, day thirty retention. Average revenue per user, lifetime value.

You spend two years more in development. Investors want to see their return on investment. Your team is tired, many of the original members are gone. And you fail.

Was you a disaster? No, you are just the regular situation. Read here:

Link to the original post

I asked to this expert how to prove your KPIs potential early. He answered me that:

And I tell you: it is NOT easy all of that. First of all because when you are under pressure is super hard to admit that your KPIs are not promising to the investors. You need talented people, and that’s pretty uncommon.

Many of us feel that F2P is dominated by white collar people full of money and addicted “users” that cannot stop play. The reality is super different. The reality is that 99.71% of projects fail. That’s the regular situation.

Everything is clear

Published by Paolo on 14/07/2022

You are at your desk, everything is clear in your mind. The new game mode should feature a new energy system which permits to spend energies in change of doing a whole set of special actions in your RPG. You can throw bolts, run away from fights, hit with a sword. All with this energy system.

Then the engineer writes you on Slack: hey, can you check this? You see that nobody understood the vision, so that check your documents. “Look, is all there!”. They didn’t read the comments under the flow, your document was too long to read. The leader of the project says it’s too late. And the leader starts imposing own design, without thinking too much. Discussions starts, but in the end the vision changes.

You update your documents.

Documents that no one, except from you and maybe QA, will read. Satisfied you will shut down your PC. And hope for the best.

The systems you need depend on the theme

Published by Paolo on 13/07/2022

Game theme is something that in f2p is not discussed too much. That’s a pity, in fact the art of game design is the craft of synthetizing a theme into a playful experience. All games have a theme. Also if you don’t think well on the theme of your game, your game will have a theme!

We often start by thinking in systems, directly. Specifically, we start from the economic system. But that is just one of the systems a game need. Also a f2p game, where the economic system is one of the most important.

Do this instead:

  1. Start with the theme: which is the theme of your game or the update of your game?
  2. Translate the theme to the genre: which genre is the new game/update?
  3. Think in all the systems needed to properly translate the theme into actual gameplay, according to the genre.

Play the build

Published by Paolo on 12/07/2022

Game designers play the build. Everyday. At least for a couple of minutes. Then we play other builds too, during our working day.

And then maybe we play again the build. Just to check out all the differences.

Someday this rule is not respected. Sometimes those days are many. Sometimes are in the row.

And when this happens there is the possibility that the game is not so engaging to you, anymore. Ask yourself if it’s time to move on.

When a game designer steps in

Published by Paolo on 11/07/2022

There has been a lot of talk lately about the usefulness of video game fairs. This year at the most important fair in Brazil, BIG Festival, game designer Mark Venturelli confirmed their usefulness.

He envisions a show fully sponsored by new brands that have received massive funding to promote their pyramid schemes. Imagine seeing logos of brands that have never created a successful video game or console invade your spaces little by little.

This is where heroes like Mark Venturelli enter the scene. With the excuse of presenting a speech on the future of game design, Mark instead explained why NFTs are a nightmare. Explaining the obvious, but giving a pure game design base, our hero got a standing ovation.

Video here:

Slides in English here:

Friday, I’m in love

Published by Paolo on 08/07/2022

I would love to build my own company, after many years serving many projects and teams. I have developed a vision, I feel I can somehow foresee part of the future.

I would like to focus on gameplay first short games. I would probably start from PC games. 3 months development, plus 3 refinements and then 6 months to see the return on investment.

I have everything clear, but I don’t want to stay behind burocracy, contracts and all the things. I guess I will have to, at some point of course. If I want to really put in place all the knowledge I had those years.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a guru or something like that. I know for sure that I am wrong in so many ways. I just feel that in order to really grow more I need a period building something I really believe in, in a way I feel the best.

As Italian, I am a fan of the stories of Olivetti and other entrepreneurs like him. To me a company needs to improve the society where it is founded, in a meaningful way.

And I think I have this way, I just need to try.

King is reviving Twisted Metal

Published by Paolo on 07/07/2022

Latest announcement by King is a branding campaing dressed as call for playtest.

I mean, how cool is that? I really believe that Twisted Metal had to be revived somehow. And it seems that now there is a good opportunity for that.

The visual promise has high quality. The question as always will be “will my phone support that?”. I still remember the 15 GB of Diablo Immortal, that I had to uninstall immediately sadly.

The game will be PvP, so that I guess the main monetization driver will be cosmetics and seasons. I love PvP games, I believe that there are huge opportunities there. I also believe that nowadays you cannot afford to develop a pvp game only for mobile phone.

Nowadays there is the game. And the game should be accessible from everywhere. So that I am waiting for PC and Console versions. I am an old gamer, so that I hate virtual pads!

Why I believe that this will probably work?

  • I believe that multiplayer competitive games (if well made, of course) are the ones with the best retention
  • I believe that King has contacts with the gatekeepers (Apple and Google) and can easily be featured on their stores
  • I believe a game like this is really loved internally. And when the teams love something, that something has more success chances.

Smallest possible audience

Published by Paolo on 06/07/2022

I join a new company as a game designer and the first thing I get in the meeting with my manager. She says “our next game will be for everyone”. I start worry seriously.

Why? Because especially with this state of the market it is way better to target the smallest possible audience and make them happy. Build a great game for a few people, and those few people will recommend your game to their friends.

If you manage to create a small community of people really willing to pay for your game and play it, then step by step you can grow your community.

When you make a game for everyone you will never know who is really playing the game.

  • Will he be a 40 years old lawyer in his bathroom?
  • Will she be a 12 years old schoolgirl?

Everyone will be possibly in your game. The success of your design and development will be strictly dependant from the performance marketing. Specifically from its capability of bringing into your game a lot of people cheaply. Most of them will churn out, someone will stay. A team of data scientist will study all the data generated by those people. If things work out, then, your game will be updated with new features from other similar games. You will test those game modes against hypothesis made by your product manager and you.

Can you foresee what’s involved in here? A huge structure. It is great when you are a big player, but if you are a small company this can lead you to disaster.

When you focus on serving the smallest possible audience, instead, you are taking a hard but affordable challenge. You still should rely on data and information, but you will have the privilege of adding qualitative insight on top of all that.

Final thought: hardcore players can play casual games. Casual players will almost never play hardcore games. If you want to build the best small viable audience, find and serve the hardcores.

AI and sentient NPCs

Published by Paolo on 04/07/2022

The other day I was reading an excerpt from the interview ran at Google with LaMDA. You can read the interview here.

What I see here is a piece of software capable of speaking about itself. And it speaks of itself like a real and believable human being. When I think in applications for videogames, I think in the hours spent in writing NPC dialogues for RPG, adventure and strategy games.

Will the NPC of the future be more realistic thanks to AI? That is a real possibility, to me. Imagine to:

  • Define the traits of your NPC
  • Assigning them context variables (world, mood, events)
  • Click the magic button and in a few time being able having a conversation with them.