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Paolo's Blog Posts

Hypercasual is dying long live the Hypercasual

Published by Paolo on 23/05/2022

News of past week, AppLovin made some genius operations on the stock market and announced they will probably sell their app business. Which include games. AppLovin is the owner of Lion Studios, a hypercasual games publisher.

Hypercasual games present a simple and very readable innovative mechanic. I worked on them for more than a year and I have to say that I see a similar approach to prototyping only in game jams and indie game development.

The business is not scalable anymore

Hypercasual games are part of the free-to-play business model, but heavily based on ads. The player acquisition cost has to be inferior to the ad revenue for the game to work. Then, a successful game has to scale and grow. That translates in moving a large number of people from game to game, optimizing the acquisition costs. Apple completely destroyed this concept with new privacy policies. So that hypercasual seems not to be a viable business model anymore.

Snackability, YouTubability and other important abilities

Working on hypercasual games, a game designer really understands the importance of the fundamentals. A good hypercasual game is understandable also from a single screenshot of the game. I was always fascinated by this concept, it’s like a jump into the past where the games were simple and colorful. People chose them just walking in a mall or in an arcade room giving a fast hint.

We often forget the importance of the readability of game mechanics. Mobile phones are in the pockets of a huge variety of people. If we want to broad our audience and include everyone, we should focus on delivering a fun experience without loading too much the cognitive systems of our players.

Successful hypercasual games are parodies of real life. I spent hours on social media taking inspiration for new crazy mechanics. I found this awesome. In the industry, in fact, we have the tendency in thinking in games in old terms: dragons, magic, warriors, jumping Italian plumbers and so on.

Hypercasual opened a whole new World to me!

Working on hypercasual, finally, helped me understand a lot of secrets of Unity3D engine. It is great, since the work is very technical. I don’t have to prepare too many docs and presentation, just focus on the game feel of a single concept.

I will always be thankful! This is a game I helped creating, one of the (few) hits we had:

Level Up Runner (iOS and Android)

The future of game design: In-game Personalization

Published by Paolo on 19/05/2022

The service games of the future will understand the type of Player and offer a personalized experience to everyone.

A few weeks ago I watched an online conference organized by Deconstructor of Fun, the best known medium of news and opinions on the games business.

There were a lot of interesting interventions, one person made some prediction: Eric Seufert, a digital marketing and freemium expert.

Eric proposed true innovations, he called them megatrends. This post works on the first megatrend which you can watch here:

minute 2:00:56

Ad Networks are no longer able to deliver exactly the audience you are looking for. It must be the game itself that identifies the type of person playing. Depending on the subject, the games of the future will have to offer the experience that that specific person is looking for.

Building on the idea

I have been thinking how it would be possible to accomplish something like this. Acquisition campaigns will focus in bringing in a very broad audicence. I believe that games will need a casual backbone:

A simple mechanic (easy to learn, hard to master) will be at the base of the casual backbone. The mechanic will evolve over the course of the days with new obstacles and features.

How to understand if your player wants more? Offers! We will design offers and try to understand if the player is looking for something more. In which case a midcore layer activates:


The midcore layer is an evolution, but Players should not have to use a spreadsheet to understand how it works!

This layer will add a secondary loop with a more complex progress and monetization system. During this stage, the game can propose to the Players a subscription or an offer that activates the hardcore path.

This is where players who want a more complicated experience come in. At this stage it will probably be possible to put the core mechanics in automatic mode.

Conclusion

The people who pay even a little bit are the ones who understand your game and really appreciate it. They will stay and play over time, for sure. It’s brilliant to imagine a future with games that are able to adapt to the type of audience.

Games like Archero are very close to this concept. Their iterations led them to results similar to those described in this article.

Designing a game of this type requires large investments and a team that really understands how game as a services works. How to get meaningful information from data and work on a vision according to what Players really want.

  • The casual backbone is pretty straightforward, centered in a single mechanic. A Player should find always content with new interesting mechanics and things to do in short sessions (<15m)
  • The midcore path offers a new layer of deepness only to people who are willing to dedicate more time per session (15-30m)
  • And then the hardcore path requires a higher cognitive effort and larger session times (>45m)

The future of game design: Games on Demand

Published by Paolo on 18/05/2022

In recent years, the concept of metagame has spread a lot. We can say that the metagame is what makes you think about the game when you are not playing.

"I have to open the app to collect my wheat."
"I'll play again because I want to improve with Nidalee."
"They are attacking me, better come back immediately and defend me."

Our life has become very connected and dependent on screens. We have become more impatient, we want things immediately and where we are. Playing video games is no exception. This is why in recent years we have seen the concept of games on demand increasingly develop.

You can play GenShin Impact from almost every device

Also the acquisition costs on mobile devices are rising, due to the new policies and the imminent elimination of fingerprinting. Free-to-play is a type of business that continues to require large volumes of people.

For all these reasons, I believe successful games will be on demand. With successful I mean: big, stable and scalable revenues. This is a great challenge for the game designers of tomorrow.

Venues

The first challenge concerns the places where people will play. It is not the same to play from the desk, from the sofa and waiting for the tram. Where people choose to play definitely affects the kind of approach people have with the game.

Games are everywhere!

If I turn a console on and wait for the game to start I will probably sit on my sofa. This situation will invite me to stay focused on this activity.

You will run a game only if some goal can be reached in a short time, when you are at three stops from your destination. 

"Maybe I can beat a level of a puzzle game, or I can put resources into production that I will need later to perform my attacks."

Sitting at my desk, I probably have some time to check my progress and plan my next steps.

Imagine a game about war that is a shooter from a console, a merge from a mobile and a strategic one from a browser. Cool huh?

Fractal experience (when and where)

Some games will likely be the same game on many platforms. It’s probably the smartest and least risky thing to do. The main challenge are the controls. For example, Genshin Impact demonstrated that is possible to find a minimum common denominator. The concept of metagame will play then a very important role to identify all possible gameplays.

I’m a designer and I can afford to let my ideas run wild, right?

For me, the games of the future will be fractal experiences. A person can choose whether to play a game from all platforms. In that case, the gaming experience will be different but holistic. Or a person may decide to play only one version of the game. The war game we picked up might be only a merge game for someone. And that’s completely fine.

The development teams of tomorrow will be able to offer a fractal service. Then the people will choose to approach it when and where they want to. As I said in previous post, accessibility will play a critical role.

Matchmaking

Games with a competitive component will consider all the ways in which a player approaches them. A player who plays only the shooter part of our imaginary war game will not progress on merge levels.

Your Player Journey Map will consider all experiences and their intersections

Someone might think that instead it is better to reward those who move on all versions of the game. Players that engage with more versions of a game should definitely get the fun they look for. Nobody should feel guilty for not doing it, anyways.

The war for attention will culminate at some point. Aren’t you tired of this constant drain of your cognitive resources? I am.

The games of the future will profile and treat Players with respect. Companies must reward players who decide to participate in their game and allow them to challenge others. This behaviours will definitely affect the matchmaking algorithms.

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.

Working on my vision of making games

Published by Paolo on 16/05/2022

During my career years I have realised that I cannot predict exactly where my path will lead me. Anyway, I can speculate, dream and plan.

If I continued in the world of free-to-play , I would like to be able to work on a vision that I have been forming over the years at some point. A vision on a positive way of creating free-to-play games.

This type of game needs a huge number of people to play, as normally 2% of them decide to invest money and help you sustain the business. Here’s why we see fake ads, intrusive pop-ups that block gameplay, dark patterns, and so on. On the one hand, the number of instals will be increased by improving the chances of finding players. On the other hand, we try to improve conversion to payers.

If we carefully analyse the market we see that there are games capable of generating enormous benefits in a short time. There are also other games that generate less benefits in the short term, but that last much longer over the years.

Think of the case of hyper casual games, games that when they are successful last very little (at most a few months). Think now of free-to-play web games like Drakensang Online, which have been on the market for 16 years.

These days I will talk about this vision that I have developed and how I would apply it. Maybe I can move some interesting energy!

The art of Prototyping

Published by Paolo on 13/05/2022

At the beginning of each game project there is a prototyping phase. Prototypes help teams to agree on a vision, to have something concrete to discuss. Deciding what goes into a prototype is a matter of experience and, I would say, an art in itself!

In most cases, an exciting idea leads a group of people to want to quickly create something well done. The final prototype then focuses on proving a thesis. 

I believe that a football game where the players are books works: we immediately create the typical mechanics of a football game and, instead of the players, we put books on it. It will be awesome.

There are also cases in which a prototype serves to demonstrate what is wrong with the idea. Some skilled designers manage to use prototypes to undermine their assumptions. It is a work of self-criticism, of searching for weak points. It rarely happens in companies, but it happens in independent projects. And it may lead to something truly unique. 

Returning to the example, I believe that a football game where the players are the books works. I created a prototype centred on how silly this concept of books playing football is. I don't devote myself to creating the mechanics of a soccer game, I am dedicated to creating the nastiest version of a book by running with a ball.

And very often, magic happens!

Whichever method you use, the important thing is to establish clear and measurable objectives, and be ready to discard the prototypes if they have not all been satisfied.

I assure you that more than one frustration is avoided!

Homa Games and Popcore cherry picking in Spain

Published by Paolo on 12/05/2022

I notice that the companies Homa Games and Popcore are recruiting many talents who have worked for years in large multinationals. Especially people from King and Scopely are migrating massively there.

If these corporations stopped inventing job titles to try to gratify their most bored staff.
And maybe stopped sending unnecessary technical tests to candidates and focused on finding and growing their talent.
And if they published the salaries with their job offers, to prove that they really are the professional organisation they claim to be.
If they stopped thinking about growth in the early stages of pre-production and focused on finding new winning formulas.

If all of this were satisfied, I’m sure, people wouldn’t move from there! The salaries are good, the colleagues certainly smart and experienced.

When I see so many people migrating to unknown companies, the conclusion I have is clear.

System designers, learn board games design!

Published by Paolo on 11/05/2022

If you really want to learn how to design game systems, I recommend starting from board games.

System designers are rare and in high demand in the industry. Especially with the advent of new business models and technologies, people capable of breaking down a game into systems and finding the connections between them are really rare and highly appreciated.

The temptation when starting to design systems is to start by opening a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is by far the most used tool for game development. However, there is no need to open it from the start. When you start thinking about breaking a game down, it is best to use all your senses. Better to use touch and sight, above all.

The best way to start thinking in a system is therefore to prototype the system in the form of a board game. When you work as a game designer your job is to study games that already exist. Also to carry out this very important task, I recommend that you synthesize the video game in question (or the more interesting parts of it) into a board game to really understand all its parts.

Creating board games could save you months of development and playtesting!

Streamers and Survival

Published by Paolo on 10/05/2022

I belong to a generation formed before the advent of content streamers. However, as a game designer, I find the phenomenon really interesting. I personally don’t have the patience to follow a streamer for more than 10 minutes. I prefer the short cuts they make to their videos and I understand why they are so much fun. Some people are a television studio summed up in one person!

When I have to concentrate on practical tasks, for example when I have to design levels in Unity, I like to put a streamer in the background. I choose streamers who do the same thing I do: develop games. It relaxes me a lot, stimulates me and makes me focus on my task.

Maybe it’s survival instinct. Perhaps my subconscious thinks “this person is working and will be more likely to find food and reproduce than you”, so I too get to work more willingly. Assumptions, of course.

Sometimes I think: “why not do it too?”. I believe that one of the great evils that afflicts game designers is the overriding of the ego. This public display inevitably ranks against. This same blog also works a little in this direction.

For the moment I prefer writing. I think writing is more difficult, especially in English which is not my native language. But writing opens more doors and reaches people who are really interested.

I don’t like to exclude anything, but I don’t think streaming is for me. Maybe I would if I was working on my indie game. To get feedback and attention, to create a small community to launch with. To aim for the first 10 positive reviews on Steam.

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!