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Everything a Game Designer must know

Published by Paolo on 27/04/2022

A LinkedIn contact shared a mind map that summarises, from his point of view, everything a game designer needs to know.

Link to the original post

His post was shared and appreciated by many professionals in the sector.

In my opinion, instead, the image is misleading. It just looks at one part of game development: free-to-play business. Free-to-play is only part of a very complex world ranging from board games to virtual reality. I know many people in Europe who are dedicated to the development of indie games and I can assure you that, for example, the “Data” part is ignored by them.

This mind map contains what free-to-play game companies expect from a game designer. Which is very different from the declared purpose.

A person with in-depth knowledge in all of these areas is very likely to feel the work of a game designer frustrating. If I know the game-as-a-service business like the back of my hand, I will continually make proposals that probably won’t be heard. Frustration leads many game designers to jump to other roles, such as product management. Pure game designers, instead, are dedicated to something else!

When you work in free-to-play you gain knowledge in all these areas, but a game designer who does his job well devotes himself to two main activities:

  1. Facilitate tools in the team to decide how the game works
  2. Involve the people who will be playing the games in the process

Facilitate game design tools

The game designers are those who help define:

  • the game systems
  • the way in which the story reaches the players
  • the experience in the game levels
  • the actions necessary to activate the mechanics.

System design, narrative design, level design and gameplay design. In the case of free-to-play: economy design, content design, level design and UX design.

It is good to know the business side and the data side to be informed about what to do, but it is very important to be able to realise the very experience you want to offer people in the game. The necessary qualities are of a technical, artistic and editorial nature.

  1. Create and use spreadsheets, touch JSON files and game engines (technical).
  2. Set up a process, help define the essence of your experience and study well the armony of all the elements of your game (artistic).
  3. Document everything and write stories both for internal inspiration and for the Players (editorial).

Involve people

Too often, busy with many daily tasks, team members forget the main component of a commercial video game: the Players.

Most video games in production will not be commercially successful for exactly this reason. The task of game designers is to involve real people constantly to test the assumptions you have about the players and the market. A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world. You need to go outside, watch people play the game and have meaningful conversations with them.

Product managers, programmers and artists don’t have the time to do this. It is up to the game designers to take care of this. If you don’t, the work comes down to constant deliveries over long periods of time and then comes to nothing. It happens very often.

Conclusion

Game design is a very complex activity, but the role of game designers is very practical and creative. It is about analysing the games and helping the team to define the tools to create the game. Then you will create gaming experiences using these tools.

It is good to know a little bit of everything. Of course, if you want to have a meaningful discussion with a product manager you should speak the language of the business. If, on the other hand, you want to have a conversation with the art director, learning about the history of art and the theory of colours can help you a lot.

But let’s never forget the fundamentals. We game designers do a very practical job!

A game is a language

Published by Paolo on 26/04/2022

A few days ago I said to a student “a game is, after all, a language to deliver a story”. He objected: “Not all games have a story!”. The student was right, but his objection is due to the semantic context of the term “story”.

A story can be a component of a game, generally expressed through its contents. By interacting with the game mechanics, players create a narrative. There are many games without a story, but the sequence of actions and events always creates a narrative. That piece you were waiting for finally appears and saves your game of Tetris. You were losing, now you have been saved by fate. If someone told the story of your match, this event would be part of it.

A story is also the path that brought your game to where it is. Your live game is constantly updated and this creates a story. The core of your player community will know your story through the various updates.

A story can also arrive absolutely asynchronously. A few years ago I discovered what was behind titles like Super Mario and Zelda. The creator of these games brought his personal childhood story to the players.

A story can also be created on other platforms thanks to your game. Some people use whole games, or parts of them, to create entertainment for other people.

Making games for the Impact Economy

Published by Paolo on 25/04/2022

Impact Economy, an economic model in which the main purpose for startups, businesses, investors and organisations is not only to maximise profitability, but also to improve their social and environmental impact.

I recently discovered the Ecosia search engine. Ecosia relies on Bing’s ad services and promises to plant trees based on the amount of searches you do on their engine. It installs easily, even on smartphones, and works really well.

The results are the same as those of other engines (I used DuckDuckGo before) and it is really a pleasure to know that you are doing good to nature just by browsing.

I wonder if it is possible to adapt this business to the video game. In fact, there are entire sectors that survive thanks to advertisements. See the hypercasual market.

Imagine being able to join the services that Ecosia relies on to plant trees and contribute by creating video games where, for each ad you view, trees are planted!

It would be beautiful right?

Player’s Advocate

Published by Paolo on 22/04/2022

The other day I was talking to a colleague. He tells me “you don’t have to worry about the decisions that come up, just think about doing your job. What they tell you to do. “. This for me is the best way to have mediocre products, designed for mediocre people with something to spend. Do your job right, just do what they tell you to do.

Game designers very often are exactly like that. True game design includes, instead, keeping promises to players. Game designers connect with players’ fantasies and offer them the experience they are looking for.

Game designers understand that a “daily bonus” is not gameplay, but simply a feature. They understand this and struggle to pass this concept on to those above as well. If your game as a service has been releasing only features and not gameplay for months, guess what: you have a problem!

If you are this type of designer, you quickly realize that the most important thing in your job is to make sure you create great products and services. Because a game is a language to tell a story. And this story must be true.

Your job is to get people to work on publishing a great game. Not garbage. No shortcuts.

If you are not the Player’s Advocate who will be?

Can Netflix, SONY and Microsoft integrate ad networks in the future?

Published by Paolo on 21/04/2022

Apple and Google have made marketers’ lives more difficult. Today, it is harder for a game to reach the right audience only through ad campaigns on the major networks that offer this service.

Acquiring new players is more expensive and often ad campaings bring people with different motivations to play.

This week’s news is that Netflix is ​​considering introducing ads to its platform. SONY and Microsoft, which are activating their subscription services, are also seriously considering introducing ads to their games.

New ad networks will be created. Someone calls them “content fortresses”. If these companies play their cards right, companies will certainly be pushed to invest in acquisitions directly on these platforms.

The more you know about people’s actions in other products, the easier it is to reach them. The ads that appear to these people will be more meaningful to them. People who enter a game are likely to be more drawn to the core features and mechanics.

Netflix, SONY and Microsoft can score a big win if they play their cards well. As designers, ads are an interesting tool to get better monetization numbers simply improving the reward ratios.

You may target a niche if your game is inherently multiplayer

Published by Paolo on 20/04/2022

When creating a free-to-play game you have two choices. Either you target a very large audience trying to structure the entire player journey to make sense for many months, or you play a game that lets you get to know other people right away and let them build their campfires.

In this second case, an inherently multiplayer game, it is possible to target a niche and build a successful service. Even if it is difficult to compete with the realities that handle more complex services where contents and levels are released every two weeks. You will probably not being a top grossing. Still your service can sustain a meaningful business and last years.

Whatever is your target, ask yourself some questions and make decisions:

  • Gameplay: What is the backbone of your service? How does it guide the rest of the game’s features?
  • Economy: How much is a game minute worth in currency?
  • UX: how do you accompany the player throughout the whole experience?
  • Level design: how do you estimate and measure the relationship between fail rate and drop off when designing levels?
  • Narrative design: in what moments of experience do deliver your story?

Players may be tired of throwing their money at gem packs

Published by Paolo on 19/04/2022

According to the Sensor Tower service and some specialised media, the benefits generated by free-to-play smartphone games have decreased. Specifically, spending on the Apple platform is under 2.3%. On Android there was a dramatic decline of 13.8%.

Experts from around the world are also questioning Sensor Tower’s estimation capability. In short, these estimates could be wrong. As a game designer, I have one, single and simple doubt: are free-to-play games for smartphones losing novelty?

Historically, video games have always thought of pushing the limits of graphics and gameplay. If we look at the premium market, with a simple glance we can see how technological progress has supported the evolution of game modes in a superb way. Even there, however, companies have begun to bet on the safe side. That’s why we see so many sequels, remakes, etc.

I’ve been downloading and trying tons of free-to-play games every week for years. I remember when I started in this video game sector, in 2012. The Pareto Principle was applied in a more courageous way: 80% copying a game, 20% introducing new things. This trend has changed lately.

Free-to-play, in order to be sustainable, needs a huge volume of players. To make this possible, acquisition campaigns need to focus on finding a very large audience. Before Apple’s IDFA deprecation, it was possible to find audiences based on concrete actions. “I would like to have inside the people who paid in this other game”. “I would like people who complete the tutorial of these games.”

This led to a new application of the Pareto Principle: 80% copying from one game, 20% copying from another. You avoid risks, you play “safe” in theory.

The result: the games that we see in top grossing are, from a gameplay perspective, always the same. Human beings certainly do not want complete and revolutionary experiences. However, we need to see continuous evolutions, or we will no longer feel attracted to what the market offers us.

A pop-up comes up with an affordable pack of gems, boosters, and some new heroes. The same type of package I bought in 3, 5, 10 games. The novelty effect of long-term gets lost.

How could we try to solve this?

  • Accepting that it is better to aim at a very large audience and, once inside the game, create different experiences for different type of player personas
  • At the same time, put at the center of your game experience something really fresh
  • Try to create games that can be accessed by multiple devices, not just smartphones, to ensure the service scalability.

Pareto principle in videogames conception

Published by Paolo on 28/02/2022

The basic use of the 80-20 rule (Pareto’s principle) in video games is to copy the 80% of a successful or promising game in order to mitigate some of the risks involved in investing time, effort and money in developing it.

Then you have 20% of freedom, where you can put your own secret sauce to the cake.

The risks of this approach come when you do not understand WHY a certain competitor works out there. It may be a successful marketing case. Maybe a special UX is what makes it great. A great level or narrative design may be making the difference. Hard to tell if you do not know basically three things:

The first thing is to deconstruct competitors,

The second thing is to run playtests with competitors games,

The third thing is to study the audience of competitors in a meaningful way.

Be ready for no-internet scenarios

Published by Paolo on 25/02/2022

In my dayjob I use a lot: Google Suite, Unity3D, Python, Github (and git in general) and a bunch of tools more such Slack, Discord or Machinations.

I work into the cloud, so that every document and every simulation or concept or prototype I produce is instantly available from everywhere.

Those are strange times, anyway. We cannot take the Internet for granted forever.

What if tomorrow you cannot access to the GDD you were workin on? What if you cannot pull the last commit from your devs? Can you work offline for, let’s say, a week?

Probably it’s time to return back to the Office Suite too…

Is data-driven design good for games?

Published by Paolo on 24/02/2022

I work in a analytics centered branch of the gaming business, which is free-to-play. Mobile games constantly collect data on usage. The expression data-driven design is widely used, but I am not sure that is the right way of doing things.

People more expert than me say that there are basically 3 kind of design approaches towards data: data inspired, data informed and data driven.

Image created by The Fountain Institute (link here)

Data-driven design, as defined here is when customer data makes decisions and shows what to design next. In my experience, this always reduces to a basic behavior: follow the biased interpretation of data made by your game lead(s).

Data is intended as information here and not as pure data. To me the best approach is the data-informed one. Players with their behavior should help you improve your game, but you should never forget about your inspiration and intuition. Games are artistic artifacts, at least good games are that.

Most of indie games using data prefer the data-inspired design, but that is very risky because often leads to not set goals properly. In order to set a good goal you should also set up key performance indicators to make periodic sanity checks.

Don’t let just your intuition decide, don’t let just the data. A good game is the perfect balance of both!