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Paolo's Blog Posts

SDT, Friction, Supercell

Published by Paolo on 27/05/2024

Self-determination theory is the single most common theory used in game design. There are lots of theories built on that, it’s simple to build new ones. Three is the perfect number, as always.

Games that offer good emergent gameplay have the right amount of friction in the 3 aspects correlated with self-determination theory components.

  • Mastery relates to mechanical friction, meaning the challenge imposed by the controls and the mechanics of the game.
  • Autonomy relates to strategic friction, meaning the challenge related to the decisions.
  • Relatedness relates to informational friction, the things you know about the game’s status.

For instance, in games like the last Supercell’s Squad Buster, you have a good balance:

  • The Player has to understand the combat system, know when to use the turbo (also in combat) and play with the action area to attack and escape at the right time
  • The Camera doesn’t permit you to see everyone, so you never know who you will meet. There is an information friction.
  • The re is a strategic friction related to the autonomy, you can decide to attack others or collect gems, but it’s up to you. Everything has a light consequence.

Content pipelines

Published by Paolo on 24/05/2024

When I design a game the tool I use the most is a spreadsheet. I use spreadsheets for predictions, calculations, but also to define the concrete experience step-by-step. And that leads always to tasks for artists and programmers.

The things you have to produce more often have a sequence of steps to be produced. That sequence is called content pipeline. Or at least, I call it like that.

Content pipelines can make or break your game. I think in FC games from EA Sports, they managed to sell cards. Which is great for content pipeline, cards are relatively easy to produce compared with 3D models and animations.

One of my responsibilities as a designer is to find the optimal content pipeline to satisfy the product thesis. It’s a team effort, an interesting problem to solve. But design plays a big part in that, because we are usually more aware of technicalities.

Onboarding and investments

Published by Paolo on 23/05/2024

I name the first session of a mobile game, the onboarding. This starts with the tutorial, which is part of the FTPE, first time player experience.

The onboarding is critical to retain Players. Especially in free-to-play games, the currency that Players will invest in a game is always their time. You will pay to get them and you should make them return. Your duty is to give them a good welcome.

This concept is widely used in the industry as a way to attract investments. You need to prove that your game retains the Players if you want to get your project funded. But there is a trap which is very easy to follow.

The trap is to focus too much on the onboarding leaving the real juice of the game aside.

In my experience, the games that retained the better on their first launch where the games where the onboarding wasn’t present at first. The onboarding design and implementation should come later, you need to first find the real essence of your game.

Using tricks to attract investment can be detrimental on the long term. Because you basically put the whole team on a treadmill, not focusing on the core experience.

Do you want to find the best core to retain? Find the core that works great also without FTPE.

The secret of discovery and exploration

Published by Paolo on 22/05/2024

The main difference between a game and other forms of entertainment is action and interaction. As I said in the previous post, action is a verb, is to do something. Interaction, instead, means communicate with some system within the game.

It can be a narrative system, it can be a level system. It can also be an exploration system. Interacting with the World of the game means exploring the game. Some game has walking, running, and riding mechanics. Some other game has menus to navigate and figure out what to do and why.

The main reason to explore a game is discovery. Discovery can be very fun when the Players understand subtly one simple secret: you can miss something.

When you read a book you read line by line. When you watch a movie you look at a series of scenes. When you play a game, instead, you decide what to do. And maybe you can miss something out.

That is something in common with social media, nowadays. Which is also why they are partly substituting videogames as entertainment, in my opinion.

Things to consider in Bartle’s Taxonomy of MUD Players

Published by Paolo on 21/05/2024

I have been in this profession for many years and still one of the best and most used ways of identifying Players and their needs is Bartle’s Taxonomy of Players.

This was created after surveying players of MUDs, multi-user dungeons. Textual multiplayer RPGs that were played on Telnet. The taxonomy is used also for single-player 2D offline platforms. I have to still understand why. The only explanation that I have is that people are lazy. They don’t want to survey their own players.

Having said that, every game designer knows this graph:

                                  ACTING
                  Killers            |                  Achievers
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
          PLAYERS -------------------+------------------- WORLD
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                                     |
                  Socialisers        |                  Explorers
                                INTERACTING

Then everyone passes to talk about the 4 Player types. There are 2 things very important to consider.

Acting and interacting

The first is the difference between acting and interacting. This is not so immediate. One may think “acting is using a mechanic while interacting is using a feature” for instance. I have heard this thousands of times.

  • Acting is to do, to perform. Is a one way verb.
  • Interacting is communicate with something. Is a two ways verb, being one of these ways stronger (listening).

If you don’t understand the difference between these two verbs, you will never understand why explorers are not achievers.

Dynamics between the types

Mr. Bartle specified in his paper that there is not a Player who always stay firm in one of the four quadrants. Usually, Players move around according to many factors. We can summarize these factors in the word: autonomy. They decide, mostly for intrinsic reasons, to switch.

When you design a game or a feature it’s important to consider the main reasons to switch and how to make that switch interesting. So that the Player who decides to do that will find always something motivating answering to that decision.

Dynamics are hard to predict when you design a game, but you can use this switch as an opportunity to create better playtest cases.

The power of microculture

Published by Paolo on 20/05/2024

I am an optimist, and that doesn’t mean that “everything’s gonna be alright”. Being an optimist means having hope that my actions can lead to better results in the future.

In the last few years, I have been perceiving the development of two spaces in the games industry (and also in music and films).

The first is the space of big corporations and companies related to them; it’s the space where serious money flows. Where the top talent works. It’s the space that right now is struggling a lot.

The second are the solo developers, the small teams, and the people who serve the minimum viable audience. This space is the one that is growing right now.

Look at the good news of the last year and a half. More than 80% of them are about some project that seems to come out of the blue. And of course, it’s not the case. It’s just that until then we weren’t part of that small audience that was following the project for months and that creator(s) for years.

I went to Retrobarcelona yesterday, a local fair dedicated to the games that made me. Arcades, pinballs, classic consoles. Craftsmanship dedicated to the IPs that still make my heart beat. People with metal band t-shirts, and a better vocabulary than the average.

I spoke with friends making more money making games for SEGA Mega Drive than they made with Switch and PS4. I met a friend who is a brilliant marketing consultant for small teams with little budget. I assisted in 2 talks of local streamers with a strong, loyal, cultured audience. I purchased books from a guy who closed his retro games store during COVID and now writes short sci-fi stories, runs a podcast, and is making a game for Dreamcast.

These realities have become bigger in the last few years. The tools to grow are there and are free. Today it’s easier for one single guy to make everything needed to run a business.

Was the other side present too? I have met a couple of friends, with exceptional talents. They were working for some of the biggest brands that landed in “sunny Barcelona”. Or they were working for investor-backed startups with huge ambitions. They either lost or left their jobs.

I am aware that my perception can lead me to the wrong reading of things, but that’s my rant for today. There are opportunities for those who are not waiting to be picked. For those who don’t use the playbook.

It’s great to have a fancy title in a corporation that belongs to the macro-culture. I still dream about it on certain days. But belonging to the micro-culture, finding and serving that minimum viable audience, can be profitable. Reddit, Substack, Patreon, Kickstarter…

That can be exciting! Not easier, you have to work a lot on it. But a concrete possibility. Something that gives me hope, that makes me an optimist.

First sparks

Published by Paolo on 17/05/2024

There is some magic in the very first idea that comes to your mind when you start any creative endeavor.

When you start working on something new, it can be a project but also simply a task, you have that first intuition. In my experience, that first spark is often the most important one.

Some of the best songs in music history have been written in a few hours, too. And with creativity in general, it often happens the same.

But of course, this is just my sensation, I have no metrics, no data, no information to back it up. I don’t know if there is a general rule, a thesis, behind this.

I like to appreciate the beauty of things and not everything has to be estimated, measured, controlled, or predicted.

Long live the first sparks. They come out of nowhere, but more often than not they are the best choice.

Nuances of play and personalized game design

Published by Paolo on 15/05/2024

A game designer thinks in the players, not in the game itself. The game is a medium to deliver a playful experience.

Every game designer has some extra to bring to the players. It can be a narrative quality or a special eye for the game feel. Maybe a good reading of spaces to design levels, or the special capacity to abstract in systems.

The first important thing is to get to know it with time. The second is that in game design everything is a system. The system thinking is critical.

When we design a game, though, we design for archetypes or personas. We design for some common denominator. And then the game arrives to real people, the Players. And everyone has their singularities.

It arrives with controls, interfaces, sounds, colors, perception load, and things that are experienced on a very personal level. Each one of us is different, so nuance makes all the difference.

What fascinates me about the clear trend of technology right now, not only LLMs, is the possibility of having a personal game designer for every player, somehow.

If we focus on the real job (system thinking with a personal extra approach) there is the chance to instruct a machine to deliver a personal experience.

Is the machine capable of changing the nuance to meet every single player’s needs?

Think simply in a level balance: too hard for Peter, too easy for Molly.

What if it can be adapted to offer the right challenge to everyone?

My feeling right now oscillates between negativity and positivity, don’t take me for a blind enthusiast.

When I read how the copyright has been assaulted to train certain models, I wanted to retire on a mountain and make offline indie games using VIM on Linux.

Still, the possibility of being capable of meeting each one of my player’s tastes is definitely exciting. Because, at the end of the day, that’s my duty as a game designer.

On sacrifice and duty

Published by Paolo on 10/05/2024

When you are an employee you are there because you can do the job. Also because you can make THAT specific job, you master certain pipelines according to your level of experience. Finally, you are there because you can work in a team.

When you build your own company, you are working on creating an environment that permits your employees to build a business.

When you are a freelancer, you have a 1-person business that helps clients (usually companies) solve specific problems.

The social media era, the dopamine times in which we live suggests us “not to work for other people’s dreams”. That’s a weird lens to use to see the World. We forget the importance of sacrifice and duty for our societies to prosper.

There are different sets of skills that you need according to what you want to do. It’s not easy for me to suggest “Hey, did you lose your job? You are an expert, why don’t you build your own company?”. The responsibilities you have to tackle are completely others, and your experience will probably give you also a lot of biases. And most importantly, you should focus on the business, not on the pipelines.

The odds for a specialist to be successful in a completely different field are higher than in building a business in the same sector. The games business is full of doctors who built successful companies.

Some game designers out there can help solve wicked problems, outside of games. At this moment we have quite a few of them. That’s my wish, honestly.

A forest

Published by Paolo on 09/05/2024

When I walk in a wood, I focus my attention on the path and stop to admire the trees. Some of them are like monuments, they grew a lot. Fantastic!

Then I discover maybe a little mushroom that has grown during the same night. That mushroom will last a few hours or a couple of days.

I don’t give too much attention to the little herbs, the underwood that’s everywhere. It’s common behavior, I think. Still, they are an important part of the view and the smell that I get from the experience.

The fact is that the big tree exists and it’s big thanks to the whole biome which permits that. It’s impossible and surreal to think in a forest made out only of trees with no herbs.

The underwood is fundamental to the ecosystem, it’s what permits the big trees to be big in the first place. And the underwood can grow up to a certain point, that’s a quality, not a limitation.

If we want more trees and a bigger forest, we should let the underwood spread more and not cut it off just because it’s not tall enough.