Currently getting wrecked by dragons in Dragon’s Dogma 2.

Hey Designer,

Welcome to issue #17 of Signposted!

We have a great issue this time around.

• This issue’s design question

• I’m making some updates to Signposted (it’s going monthly)

• The SF Game Design Blog Archive is back with a look at Warhammer 40,000 Freeblade!

• We’ll talk about some F2P Player Profiles

• The date has been set for the Dragon’s Dogma 2 design chat (April 26th at 9 PM Pacific)

• I’m adding more job resources to the end of the issue

In the best of series, we’ve got some amazing pieces:

• A think tank of designers put together a paper on creating story-rich mechanics

• I discovered the Game UI Database which displays the complete UI for thousands of games

• Andrew Chambers discusses Diablo 3 vs the Last Epoch

• Keith Burgun chats about Action Loops

• Liv Peelan and the Corner of Story and Game team discuss narrative design and 4 of the Art of Game Desiig’s lenses

If you enjoy Signposted please be sure to share it so more people can enjoy this content! 😁

We’ve got a hefty issue, let’s get into it!

Signposted Design Question of the Issue!

Every week the Signposted community discusses a specific design related question. This one stood out this month:

"What's a game you feel is poorly balanced? Why do you think it is poorly balanced?"

Here’s some takeaways from the last conversation:

• If something is vastly overpowered in all scenarios, then it feels unbalanced

• If something feels not valuable at all in any scenario it feels unbalanced (I've seen this happen economically many times with resources in late game)

• If the intended skill level is unable to utilize the character/item/etc to the designer's expectations it is unbalanced (this is a bit of catch all for situations like in he fighting games where some characters are only usable by high skill players, but they are intended to be used only by them)

• It's more common for a system to be unbalanced rather than an entire game

• The goal of many, "bad balanced" scenarios is to get players to try playing a different way and is not actually balanced poorly (like in dark souls, you struggle if you don't utilize weaknesses)

Make sure to join in the conversation for the next design question, every Wednesday in the Signposted Discord.

Signposted Update

First off I want to thank you for subscribing. Between the Archive and Signposted we’re pushing just over 1,600 subscribers. That’s a staggering number, way more than I expected when I started this 8 months ago.

With that being said, some of you may know I’m a new dad and Behemoth is demanding more of my attention recently. This is in addition to all the content I put out weekly. Between work and my daughter learning to run, my free time has plummeted.

In order to maintain putting out quality content, running book/design club, doing 1:1s, and not going insane, I’m having to make some changes to my content calendar. This includes signposted going monthly instead of bi-weekly. 😔

What does that mean for you? Each issue is going to be THICC going forward, but you’ll get them less often. Please look forward to new issues on the first Monday of the month.

With that being said, I’ve got some exciting new content ideas coming in the next couple months, so please make sure to keep an eye out for the next issue to learn more.

Thanks again for subscribing. I hope you’re as excited as I am for the future of Signposted and Game Design.

Bi-Weekly Analysis and Updates

Recently I started a second newsletter, the SFGD Archive. It takes a fun look at some of my older blog posts and talks a little about my experience as a game designer (or more of trying to navigate the early days of my career). The second issue is available at the link below:

Warhammer 40,000: Freeblade - Touching the Grim Dark Future

Initially published on December 3rd, 2015

Quick Takeaway:

• Freeblade has excellent touch controls

• Brief Background

  • Freeblade is a 3rd person rail shooter where the player is a giant robot tearing through hordes of enemies

  • The fun is found via expertly dispatching these enemies, and being rewarded by cool explosions and combat animations

• Some controls/mechanics

  • Player taps and holds to fire their generic machine gun right above the location they are holding

  • Holding for too long will cause the gun to overheat and need to recharge before use again

  • The way this is designed encourages players to attack in short controlled bursts, instead of just holding the machine gun fire button down the entire time.

  • This also makes the weapon effective against groups of weak enemies instead of larger armored enemies.

    

• Heavy Weapons

  • Pressing two fingers and spreading them creates an aiming reticle in between them while the camera zooms in

  • When the player removes their fingers the weapon is fired

  • These weapons typically are good for taking out large enemies. They do high damage to a controlled small space due to them only having 3 rounds before needing to recharge

• Shields

  

  • Enemies with heavy weapons are highlighted by blue parenthesis with arrows at each edge

  • The arrows slide along the parenthesis until they collide, this is when the enemy will fire

  • If the player taps the enemy before the arrows collide, they will deploy a shield

  • This is particularly useful when there is a group of enemies and the player has run out of ammo so they are waiting for a recharge

  • I like this mechanic because, while not as exciting as combat, it continues to engage players and forces the players to do something different

• And Finally Glorious Melee Combat

  

  • This is designated via a red fist icon and some red parenthesis

  • What I like about this particular scenario is that I have a choice

  • Go into close combat and get an awesome combat cinematic, or Indiana Jones this poor guy and just shoot quickly with the big guns

  • If the player doesn’t tap within the red parenthesis or kill the enemy quickly enough, the enemy will get a free close combat attack on them. So doing the Indiana Jones thing of just shooting them has its own risks

    

  • A bar will appear in the bottom half of the screen and the player must tap the screen when the two white fist bars are within the green areas

  • The white bars start on the edges of the “Hit!” bar. They travel inward simultaneously

  • The player has an area in which they can activate the attack to do normal damage (transparent green bar), and an area to do critical damage (filled in green bar in the dead center)

• Back to controls

  • We see a few themes in this game which are known across other excellent iOS games

  • The biggest point being the usage of touch gestures which are already commonly used in touch applications

  • To elaborate, separating fingers to zoom in and tapping on the screen with a player’s index finger are all examples of gestures we do every day just to surf the web with our smart devices

  • Players have been already exposed to all these gestures and they are easy to learn in game

  • Because the player is tapping on the enemies they’re focused on the gameplay rather than some other mobile games which use buttons at the bottom of the screen

    • Because screens are smooth and you can’t feel them like on a controller or PC you’d need to spend more time focused on hitting the button in games which have buttons on the screen rather than the action itself

Game Economy Design Concepts: F2P Player Profiles

When designing the progression and economy for F2P games it’s important to understand how your players will progress through the game. In particular, how fast they consume content.

In this carousel we go through some of the player profiles I consider when planning a game’s progression and economy,

Quick Takeaway:

• Today let's discuss some game economy design concepts: F2P Player Profiles

• A big part of the progression aspect of systems design is forecasting how players will progress based on how they engage.

  • There are a few player profiles you’ll want to consider when making a F2P game:

• Minnows

  • Minnows are players who spend about $1 a month

  • They typically have low engagement with your game as they share their time with other games as well, so they’ll progress slowly as they’ll only pop in a couple times a week

• Dolphins

  • Dolphins spend about $5 to $25 a month

  • They also have typically low engagement with your game as their time is shared across multiple games

  • But they’ll progress a little bit faster/further than minnows since they are spending more and stick around longer than minnows

• Whales

  • Whales spend at least $25 a month

  • These are some of your most loyal players.

  • They’re going to progress a lot faster than the Dolphins

    Take into account how much faster players can progress when they take advantage of sales regularly or purchase special characters

  • Ideally at launch you want to have at least a few months of content planned out for whales, so your LiveOps has time to kick in and give them more content

• Leviathans

  • The rarest type is the Leviathan, they buy every offer they see. They can spend easily $1000 a month or more

  • These are your most engaged players, who also have excessive expendable income

  • They will burn through your content at the fastest rate possible. Assume they buy everything, focus solely on your game, and grind nearly 24/7

  • In all the games I’ve worked on, I’ve only ever seen a handful of Leviathans

• Where to start?

  • Whales and leviathans are typically where you start when you plan your progression curve

  • This is because if they run out of content too quickly they will churn, and without them your studio will have a much harder time sustaining the F2P model (though it has been done)

• Where to start? 2

  • Once you’ve figured out how their experience will function, you work backwards to make sure Dolphins and Minnows will still have a fun experience

  • Remember, Whales + Leviathans typically make up about 50% of the games’ revenue but the other half of your revenue is still coming from the little guys, don’t neglect their experience

• Non-Spenders?

  • Non-Spenders are still important as you need them to have a larger player pool (especially important in PvP games)

  • In my initial F2P progression projections, I typically chart their experience at about a year of non stop playing to max everything

  • I tune from there making it lower if it was too painful to progress

  • With this buffer there is plenty of time for LiveOps events to kick in and create an endless cadence of content for these players

• Reminder

  • These are a basic set of F2P specific terms, each studio has additional sub categories depending on the scale of their audience and the type of game they are making

  • For example: you may need to plot a golden path (players who only do primary objectives) projection or a killer (player who only engages in PvP) projection

  • It’s never a bad thing to gain a better understanding of your player’s experience

• Thank you

• If you found this useful, please share it!

Discord - Design Chat Event

Recently members of the Signposted Community met up and dissected Helldivers 2. What was meant to only be a one hour chat turned into a two hour deep analysis. We discussed everything from the core loop, to how balance changes affect the game, and more!

Dragons Dogma 2 won the last voting round! We’ll play Dragon’s Dogma 2 over the course of the next month then get together and analyze the good, the bad, and what we think we could improve on Friday 4/26 at 9 PM Pacific.

RSVP to the event in the discord:

The Best of Game Design

The Best of Written

PLAYFUL NARRATIVE: A TOOLBOX FOR STORY-RICH MECHANICS

By Shelby Moledina, Cat Manning, Jeff Pobst, Alicia Fortier, Alexander Youngblood, Kaitlin Tremblay, Kevin Snow

Every year there is a Game Design retreat, hosted by Polaris. What comes out is a series of papers analyzing game design topics. To be completely fair, they’re all worth a read, but this was the first one I’d found.

_{(And if anyone from the Polaris committee is reading this, I too would like to go to a fancy resort and spend the weekend talking game design. Take your time. I’ll just be casually waiting for my invite…} 😅₎

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor | Game UI Database

By The Jedi Survivor UI Team

In the last couple weeks, I discovered the holy grail for UI designers. Welcome to the Game UI Database. A MASSIVE website with the complete UI of thousands of games. Recently the UI of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was added. Not a lot of reading for this one, but thumbing through the images you can really appreciate the work that went into the UI.

The Best of Video

Diablo designer on why we couldn't make Last Epoch

By Andrew Chambers

Andrew Chambers uses a comparison of Last Epoch to Diablo 3 to set the scene and do an almost Diablo 3 Postmortem. It’s fun and worth a watch if you’re interested in Action RPGs or Diablo 3.

Game design discussion with Bricksparts and Epriest on ACTION LOOPS

By Keith Burgun Games

This was an interesting discussion I found where Bricksparts, Epriest, and Keith Burgun discuss action loops. It’s a bit dense but I had never thought of these “loops” in this way before. I have the video start at 8:20 because that’s when they summarize what they’re trying to achieve and makes it much easier to follow.

The Best of Audio

🏆 Issue #17 Scott’s Pick 🏆- The Lenses of Game Design | Liv Peelan on the Lenses of Elemental Tetrad, Holographic Design, Unification, and Resonance

By The Corner of Story and Game Team and Liv Peelan

In this podcast, Liv and Gerald discuss 4 of the lenses from the Art of Game Design as they relate to Narrative Design. She also discusses her time as a narrative designer and what drew in to game design as a career.

And that’s it for Signposted #17. Thanks for reading!

Scott

Additional Resources:

This section are some additional resources I’m putting together to help out designers at specific pain points in their career. The list will grow with time.

Signposted wouldn’t be possible without the support Patrons. Thank you so much for everyone who reads, shares, or financially supports Signposted.

Signposted Producers

Andreas Lopez

To become a Producer or Sponsor of Signposted, join the Signposted Patreon.

If you enjoy Signposted please be sure to share it so more people can enjoy this content!