Doing the Work For a Top Grossing Game | Game Design by Paul Leydon

hey everybody welcome today we're going to talk about doing the work that's what it's all about essentially in this video paul layden who is leela games chief creative officer talks about his experience and the kind of work and research he believes it takes to design a top grossing game and paul should know he has worked on a bunch of number one top grossing and top free games from his time working at mz on games such as game of war to where we met while i was leading development on king of avalon at fun plus to working together at sega i think you'll enjoy a bit of a different perspective from many other traditional game designers and to get paul's specific perspective on design and in to play this talk was the second session at the india free to play games conference and be sure to check this out as well as some of the other sessions more info in the show notes welcome to the game makers channel and be sure to subscribe for more content on free to play game development

and also be sure to subscribe to both the youtube channel and to the newsletter link in the show notes so joseph says i worked on a lot of top grossing games which is too which is true i worked with a lot of teams who produced a bunch of top grossing games and so most first of all i started off as just a qa tester and then i got a chance to work as a designer and um recently in the i mean in the last previous discussion someone said what about business versus passion i thought that was a good question i think since the very first time i came into the industry i really didn't know the difference between the two you know there's uh the aaa world there's the free-to-play world and there's supposedly this big difference between the two i can go on a huge a huge tangent about that but for me free to play and triple a were the same i never really thought as free to play

as like this evil thing that preys on human weakness for profit and triple a is like this beautiful passion place where you know true passionate people exist and that's a whole other thing but really it made me think about the beginning of this topic like reality versus passion so today i'm going to talk to you about depth and hard work and how i think it can help make a top grossing game and it may actually come off as pretty passionate in the end even though everything i'm talking about it's about making a top grossing game i mean if i were to talk about a top racing game you would think maybe i'd talk about kpis k factor draining the economy making sure you have reoccurring purchases groups of users putting together clever features cohorting events sales christmas diwali thanksgiving cyber monday new year's

but we're not going to talk about those things today it's i think those things are a little bit stuff i kind of don't like to go into usually when i give a presentation i like to talk about basically doing the work if you've ever seen any of my youtube content i just do the work i really don't want to look back on my career and see me talking about things i know unless i have a really great great product under my belt which is something i'm trying to work on here at leela now so without further ado let's go into the talk let's say you were trying to make a top gracing game in one of these categories which is known as 4x march battle you got rise of kingdoms ebony game of thrones conquest number 28 top grossing 46 and 94 as of august 23 2021. your company's got a big old bank account some executive hires a bunch of people a bunch of artists come in they got their cintiqs they're cranking stuff out pm's walking around designers trying to come up with something they got to come up with a theme i mean what are you going to do to

get into this space this is what the industry is really about it's about getting into a space it's about creating something within the space unless you're totally innovative and you come up with something like i don't know minecraft or flappy bird and if you could use that then good for you but for the rest of us we work for our paycheck rather than waiting to win the lottery you know those lottery hit games are tough a lot of us are analyzing trying to figure this out so for the most part these are some tough games i mean let's just take a look at rise of kingdoms i mean rise of kingdoms here's a little video of it i mean this thing's polish man i mean let's just rewind it here a little bit see my video might freeze up for a second this thing's extremely polished game i mean the ui is flawless the economy flows super well it's just such an expensive product so to beat this i mean the bar is extremely high i mean ebony's kind of old game of thrones i mean they have game they have vip game of thrones for the god sake so

maybe ip's not even the answer so do you make a better version i mean rizza king is pretty good but what do you do about these games match threes how do you make a top grossing match three game you got tuned blast gardenscape royale match i mean all these match three just as equally as one that's one another they're all pretty colorful all pretty sparkly i mean what do you do match candy match gems match flowers match how many different themes can you think of you're going to put an ip on this marvel match power ranger match i mean look at look at match royale i mean this game is is incredible uh royale match i was just playing it recently and it's got a lot to offer man it does it super well and they did it in the midst of everyone else at king.com where are they at right they supposedly have all the analysis all the data all the team everything and uh this isn't biking.com

so how do you make a top racing game like this and it's actually evaluated like a billion dollar company or something like that it's crazy the success on this game is insane i actually really really big fan of this company now how do you do it with a shooter game you got garina free fire top 25 pub g mobile top 26 as of august 23rd at least in the united states and then call of duty mobile top 34. i mean all these games have characters that run around shooting guns someone gets eliminated when they're shot enough i mean how do you get into that space what do you do i mean let's let's take a look at uh maybe some garina free fire i mean this game's not that great looking right how does that work how does this game become the top racing game of all the shooter games that's a really big question and a lot of companies want that answer how do you make a top grossing game or a game that does well in whatever your target is which mostly is top grossing

so here's a slide that kind of tries to explain it at a really high level now by the way i'm just making a presentation here i'm just trying to have fun talk about things this isn't everything that people do but it's basically high level what i think happens so in the middle you have this little illustration of a gaming company and there's some existing experience there right most people have existing experience and above the black line you see they want to hire the best you know we're gonna you know we're we're we're we're king we got the money you know we're super cell we're gonna hire right we're craft on we're us we got money we're gonna hire the best in the world so we got we got the designer from king.com oh we got the designer from supercell now we're good or maybe they're going to use a ton of analytics so yeah we we got analytics you know we're applovin we're zynga we're voodoo we have so many games you know we know all the analytics and what maybe what they hope to do in the space is to potentially make a game that's

just higher quality right maybe like rise to kingdoms was higher quality right it has a maybe a unique approach with the features and it's kind of hopeful that the new hires and the new data and all these things are going to bring you those results to a better looking product you got to better you get the best art director you got the best designer you got the best the systems designer now we're gonna we got this or maybe you have a different strategy like you decide you know what we're just gonna be like uh garina free fire you know we're not gonna be the best we're just gonna be the most performant we're to perform the best and be delightful across many devices and that's one way to do it too but it's still again a strategy or maybe you're going to be like a what is that game royale match and you're going to be a little bit of all you know you're going to have a good strategy better looking and a unique approach to features but this is sort of where i think most

people kind of live in and so let's take a look at what it's like to get a new hire for your top racing game and the companies are throwing around ton of money for this stuff right so over here you got a bunch of guys trying to get the job this lady she got the job she got five to eight plus years experience she launched a couple titles one was a big hit in the category that you want to get a top grossing game in she interviewed super well and she presented a really cool design doc she's going to give you the edge i mean what does the company really hope from these great hires and in fact a lot of companies get really annoyed by this they're like geez the ceo you know he keeps on hiring new people he thinks that the silver bullet is going to walk through the door we already have a lot of existing talent and gosh i mean what's going on so even just getting a new hire into the flow of things has its complications but i think what people hope for is that this person has gone through a bunch of experience i

mean she's played a ton of match threes or uh you know been scene ui that failed somebody's like let's make the ui like this and she's like no you don't want to do it like that and she's looked at a bunch of databases and uh you know made live tools and been there for the diwali sale the christmas sale the new year sale the halloween and she can actually make a game that's a business but sometimes that's actually not the case there's actually a lot of people who have a lot of experience who are actually not that good um not that i'm good but for example you could work at pub g for five years but that doesn't necessarily make you good at the next shooter game i mean there's a lot of features there before you i mean you could have worked at king.com launched the game that was a top grossing game but maybe it was riding the back of a bunch of other successes so what you're really hoping for is that the authenticity of the experience in the intuition is there

and what about the other side of the industry which is analytics and analytics you have a few things that i just put down a couple here for fun this little image here represents like a little database and you got your little data person here your feature seeker right there on linkedin hey i found this battle pass feature it's awesome or the feature measurer like hey this feature is worth three cents because it's cosmetics and at zynga we measured this as a three cents based on the arp dow and all this measurement or the database of stuff what is that you know applovin's got all this information zynga's got all this information what is that information oh maybe it's like we know blue is better than red and we know scarecrows perform better than pumpkins and we know that in the first three minutes if you fail uh you could in the first three minutes of your game play you're likely to quit and if we can get you to spend in the first 10 seconds then maybe you'll be a bigger spender and this is just massive

database of stuff and so you have your lifetime per user stuff you know people talk about the k factor and all these metrics and there's even the platform researchers people who say hey you know fish games do really good on facebook so we should make a fish game oh look there's a really trending thing on steam we should make one of those kind of games let's research all these things and maybe this will give you the edge to your top grossing game and this is sort of the same thing as a new hire right you're gonna have data you're gonna have metrics you're gonna have insight you're gonna have marketing you're gonna have features you're gonna have basically experience and intuition you hope that there's going to be some thing the the the analytics are going to tell you if you're game of thrones it could work because people like game of thrones and it really fits us in the color scheme of this and be i talked to this one company and if we add this clan feature to really take us there and if you have

the the the right hires and the right analytics everything can come together and i think um a gentleman in the last call just said it like the passion and the business comes together we have to shake hands and i wanted to talk to you today about something that i'm just going to call depth and doing the work and i think the this concept actually equals almost every single concept indirectly just because of the the the act of doing the work will actually unlock everything that's otherwise kind of confusing in the industry i'm going to use two examples for this mobile shooters and maybe a match 3 example so throughout my career um i worked in a lot of situations where i didn't feel like i was as good as some of the people around me got these yale guys these stanford guys you know they're laughing at games

hahaha you know this game's funny and you know i always kind of felt like maybe i don't quite understand what i'm seeing here how are these games top grossing how are these games working so for the longest times i can remember since about now going on maybe about 10 or 12 years ago i've always just studied a lot of games and i just do a lot of work and i believe it's a result of that work that is probably your best bet of getting a top grossing game and i'm going to demonstrate some of that work right now for my attempt at making what i believe is going to be the next top grossing shooter game and right now that's my big mission at leela is to make a top-grossing shooter game uh during a dinner one time somebody was like you're trying to make a shooter game you're crazy you know they're just like yes it's too much they don't really understand the kind of stuff i do so let's let me show you an example i'm going to switch over and kind of share

some depth in doing the work this is an example of uh illustration file of me looking at a feature inside of pubg mobile and if i keep scrolling up you're just going to see these lines pointing at certain features and everywhere i go you're just going to see more of that and if i keep zooming out and keep zooming out you'll see that about a nine months ago and maybe more i researched every single feature inside of pubg mobile every single one something i've done for a very long time when it comes down to a product that i'm really serious about trying to take down where i'm trying to get in there i know every single feature by its name even the fact that there's a no internet screen do you know what a no internet screen is and oh no internet screens when you log in there's no internet i mean that's a screen and someone's got to design it or what about a down for maintenance screen or what about the faqs what about the

push notifications what about how you jump what about how you land what about how you run every single feature in the entire game every single one i got it by its name perfectly and i believe that this kind of work unlocks everything that i believe what it takes to actually make a top grossing game here's a list of things that i think is what really makes top grossing games above all this is just in my department and there's really strong people that feel really strongly about analytics and marketing and we need those and you know joseph's he's brilliant at those things and i'm glad that he you know he's on my side because i really love this kind of stuff so what i'm going to do is keep on showing you some research and show you how deep that i will go to actually try to crack the code of what it takes to make a top grossing shooter game and then i'll show you with match three two so intuition context training systems in ui

knowing why the feature matters planning it better making it smaller making it better getting done making clear docks and keeping engineers unblocked is when i wrote down a list of how to make a top grossing game this is what kept showing up in my and on my bullet point list now every single time i worked on a product that was successful this was always it and it came down to having absolute clarity i mean absolute clarity clarity that you just can't even fathom the kind of clarity that makes most people go are you serious dude like when i talk to some of the designers that join the company and i tell them and i show them some of the work i'm doing they're like holy crap and this is nothing i can tell you so much about shooter games over the last year of research i mean even nine months before we raised money against this company i had already had research like this i could tell you everything about a shooter game i could tell you what the sun looks like

in call of duty uh war zone i mean let's just pull up a war zone study real quick here's the call of duty warzone study this is just more screenshots it's kind of just look like a crazy amount of work i'm going to scroll in and look at for the sunlight here we go the sunlight it's this nice dew drop it's a nice dew drop what about the sunlight in pubg mobile it's like six lens flares that kind of pull back and they're all octagon shape we'll go ahead and pull that up for you here pub g every screenshot that i've taken just for environment purposes here's the you know tons of octagon lens flares and it's kind of like that in call of duty mobile as well call of duty mobile research i mean i wanted to understand it at such a deep level

that i would know everything about the game i'm when i say everything i mean everything okay like everything what is everything about this game how can we see the shadows of this game how if somebody asked me about the sunlight i need to know exactly what i'm going to say how many items are in this game what is it really going to take to launch this thing you know i even know where the best weed is in this game the weeds of the grass this is a weed right here and weeds are really good for the environment they make it look disturbed but you only have so many choice chances to get this right because there's only so much pixels and polygons you can really work with right so you know a really good looking uh weed may look like something in uh grand theft auto 5. this is some super good weeds down the side of the banks but can you accomplish something like that i mean probably not but it's at least a good example

and it doesn't even stop here i even have call of duty mobile research similarly almost about as much as pub g not as much but i had to stop at a certain point because there's so many things you can research at once and so i can get a feature list down to such minute detail that when i'm working with a pm or when i've showed some ceos back in the day and they say man this feature list is recruit is crazy and i'll say no man that's a top grossing game right there if you want to make a top person game that's what we need to do guaranteed and of course there's your own spin right you can't just make a copy of exactly the game so how do you do that someone once asked me which is a whole another topic and i'll get into that maybe with the match three so after i broke down every single feature in every game from the sunlight to the shadows to the way that the windows are tinted or not tended on cars every single gun skin every single

button knowing everything even watching some youtube videos that are in different languages because they're not explained in english because pub g has a lot of foreign language youtubers that i can't even understand after i've researched everything i can then break things down to such an easy way of looking at stuff that we can plan it better i can know exactly why the feature exists i mean in knowing exactly why not just arbitrarily not just saying hey we need clans i mean a traditional feature list for most designers is like clans uh you know battle you know uh shop clan shop you know and it's it's deep but it's not that that that that deep and so this research is non-stop with me and even if i show you some stuff that i'm doing with my team this is a research of uh from a designer that we work with his name is temgee he was tasked with looking at every

single item in garina free fire and he when i told him about this i was like yeah man it's gonna be a lot of work um and he's like holy crap i mean if i keep scrolling out here this is such tremendous amount of work that it's almost just ridiculous how many screenshots this is one by one one by one by one by one everything breaking down every single character every single gun mapping it around the entire thing and i'm able to do this with my team because i lead by example i tell them look man we're going to be in the business of the shooter game and i'm going to have to manage a big economy here i got tons of saturdays to fill you know how many saturdays i got to fill there's so many saturdays so many weekends so many so many events i mean exactly what level of customization will we be able to give i mean this is super important when it comes to context of a feature when you say you want to add a battle pass in your game well how many tiers is the battle pass going to be

tell me how many tiers what's going to be in that tell me how many tiers are going to have in that and what's going to be on tier 20 you think you have something engaging enough to get people to tier 20 and then what's the leverage how are people earning xp against the battle pass do you have weekly missions what are the missions and this is extremely difficult industry to work in you have people who are constantly trying to figure things out they're like we're going to slice up the features and know we're going to test it some pms have these big bright ideas we're going to test these features in small countries we're going to get the data back on it so how could you even know if the feature would work i mean if you're going to test clans in a small country don't you need a ton of stuff for clans to even work you need a player name you need a player profile you need the game mechanic you need chat you need a clan menu you need a reason for it to even exist it is so intertwined that the better you can really understand where you're going

i feel is the best way to make a top grossing game and it really comes down to making clear docks and keeping engineers unblocked i mean when you look at the expense of an engineers in the silicon valley it's through the roof your burn rate is just going down so when your engineer when your designer walks in and he's like yeah i got five years experience okay whatever tell me what we got to do man okay you worked on pub g great i'm so excited we got the pub g designer no way i bet you if you sat me down next to the best pub g designer he would be blown away that i've never made a shooter game because i've done so much work it's just totally unreasonable monday through saturday 12 hours a day doing things way in the night time constantly researching constantly pushing and so could this be uh could how could we make a top grossing game well i can't tell you what we're doing in our mobile game but let

me show you how this type of deep work could potentially result in a top grossing game just through a fun example and let's use match three as that example and so here is um match real or royale match every screenshot that i that i could think was just at least reasonable for this presentation okay so let's say it's my job to make a top grossing match 3 game which i've never done and i don't i don't know or claim that i could but it would definitely be a lot of fun so how does doing the work actually result in getting the answer and so i wanted to kind of go over here and show you just some pictures of these are some hard drives of mine i got a bunch of these laying around and i was going to kind of scroll this you know show you some stuff and just show you a bunch of work from a long time ago that was sort of in the vein of where royal match ended up and try to explain

how this hard work in the depth could result into something that is otherwise sought out through buying vendors trying to use analytics and all this crazy stuff so let's take a look at a video from 2011 and i'm going to go ahead and open up my finder here and just kind of drag it in so this is my finder on my computer this is a an old hard drive i have and that's just a bunch of research that i've done throughout the years now this is literally what i think it takes to like make a top racing game here so i don't have like anything special to tell you i'm just trying to show you insights of my work into what i do and what i hope unlocks top grossing stuff so you may see some fun stuff in here maybe the old school guys remember stuff like this does anyone remember this game so my screenshots and my my my studies go back super far they go back so far that i've even lost some too

early early game design because i started luckily right when the iphone came out and i just love free to play and so let's take a look at i don't know like a crime story tutorial so you know how i was showing you a tutorial of match match three well this is the tutorial literally if you look at this date right here from friday december 2nd 2011 at 2 30 pm that says friday december 2nd 2011. and here i am before you could even record the screen facing my camera at the damn the damn device trying to understand free to play and i'm just going through the motions just like okay here we go i'm like trying to understand this new game called crime story and this goes way back we don't have game refinery we don't have tableau i don't have a pm i don't have the best zynga hire i don't have a craft

on higher i don't have a king.com hire there's no one going to save me i'm just using my thumb and clicking through and you can see my younger face and the reflection of the device and i'm just trying to figure it out i mean we're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of games constantly pushing buttons and you know and i go into these companies and i work with these awesome ceos and these awesome businessmen and they're like hi paul well yeah we'd love to give you a job you know there's a budget for you i'm like dude what's going on here everyone's walking around buzzing around everyone's got their big ideas somebody just got off their last article and i've been hammering and researching and trying to understand free to play for as long as i can remember and it still doesn't guarantee me the success at a top grossing game so here i am just playing it out or what about this screenshot here from 2014 so just so i could uh potentially prove the fact just because

it probably would be uh good if i go to what is the name of that game it's called what's that thing called morning line if i go here and press m morning line where's that guys oh it's in match my match three folder sorry match threes research morning line video here's my videos from 2014 and uh this is the file uh that i have open here this was me trying to figure out every single level in a match three game it cost me around 300 bucks to do this and the company didn't reimburse me for it i was just trying to figure it out so i researched every single level every combination i was just curious i mean i was told we may work on a match three do i have any ideas so i went the distance i tried to figure it all out and i chose a relatively less known match three hoping that i could find

simplicity in it and maybe it would end i wanted to see the levels repeat i wanted to see if it was possible to see how this thing worked so let's go back to match royale and then go down to a time when i was working on a game called adventure communist i made a youtube video um i was trying to make a game that was better than adventure communist now this may you know be too lengthy i don't want to get into it but essentially i tried to make a series of videos where i was trying to make a game that was as good or better than adventure communist and i came up with this idea and it looks like this so this is the game there's a bunch of stuff down here that you click and there's people up here screaming help and then there was this idea that there would be a bunch of zombies running towards the this structure because i noticed that afk arena had an incredible advertisement that didn't even make sense for their game it was just a lot of zombies

running at a at a hero and i thought if i could build this mechanic of a lot of zombies running into this this this into a hero situation if you see here it says afk arena is advertising with content that doesn't exist simply why so i thought if i could get into this space i could potentially create a design and how did i come up with this design and would this design even work well it comes from you know years of recording stuff and just thinking about stuff and i thought well maybe if there's someone screaming help and it's this whole situation it could be a theme that works a brand that works and a game that works fast forward to a time when i got a a deck from a analytical deck from liquid and grit one of the best decks out there i mean liquid and grit is like one of the best for when it comes to analytics on games i still have that deck right here and uh if i scroll down it said hey there's

this game called piggy go it's like piggy go introduces leela's lily's kitchens and so i decided i was gonna study piggy go this was in um i forget when this was this was like a couple months ago i took every single game every single picture and i started to maybe try to you know make improvements on it i was like trying to design things for it look at all the facebook touch points how are they trying to integrate facebook and i'm just super curious i'm just super passionate about this stuff and what's so cool about piggy go i can actually pull up the research here's all my my videos you can see some of them this one's at 9 54 p.m on a wednesday and i work all day because i work on an american schedule and i also work with india so i'm doing this stuff i mean my investors don't want me researching match three games i mean do they does joseph want me researching a match three game i'm supposed to be working on shooters but

the thing is i just can't stop because i have to know because there are serious consequences for me pretending that i do know there's serious consequences for me writing articles and taking podcasts and spewing out a bunch of information that may not be right i just want to be right i just want to win the only thing i want to do is make a game that changes the lives of people who play it changes the lives of the people who work at the company and then changes the lives of the investors who invested in the company this is what i really want to do and so what i noticed is that on the second login for piggy go there was this really funny moment where it said you unlocked a new feature and that new feature came into the form of this girl who was screaming for uh me to open up this cage i gotta find it you guys gotta see this it was so cool i'm not able to find it that quickly i thought it was on the session too

where you at lady it looks like she's already freed well let me show you what i found in my research i found that there's this girl who's screaming for help in a cage and i was like damn i was just thinking about that i mean just like a year ago i was trying to design a a game that was lucrative in 2020 and here i am in 2021 and i saw this help help and it doesn't really mean anything like it doesn't really fit the game that well but it's interesting right like she's basically a feature and the feature is in the form of this lady and she unlocks you have to free her from the cage and it really means nothing and it never happens again ever it's just that one time she's in distress and then you she thanks you and she becomes this menu which is the menu that i was looking for when i first looked for this uh doc

now let's fast forward to um match rayon and match royale's really cool royal match they have the the clear indication of a castle right here super nice and then they have this guy who's about to get crushed by a wall and right before i just downloaded this app i read the top review and the top review says this i have played all 951 levels and he says it shows the game as playing to save the king in different predicaments i have played all 951 levels in rounds which are just harder repeats of the previous play levels and only played two or maybe three rounds in which was consistent with the ads and when i saw that i was like i know exactly what they're doing it just crossed my mind like that bam i was like i know exactly what they're doing this

was exactly like the feature that i was doing over here i was trying to create a feature that was sort of baked in that would really help improve the ads so i'm thinking about everything as a free to play designer how does the store look even though i we're just beginning on our on our on our first on our mobile shooter game i know exactly how i want the store to look and i know exactly how it's going to be for your first time user experience because i've seen so many first time user experience i know exactly what we're going to sell i know exactly how it's going to feel everything and when i saw them do that i was like wow this that's they are actually creating a feature where you build and what's funny about piggy go is that piggy go actually builds stuff too you build out your island and so i was like jesus christ this is pretty much like piggy go and it's also kind of like the game that i came up with a little bit i mean it's like there's a space down here in which i do the action i mean this is

the bottom half of the game and then this is the top half where this person's saying help me now did i come close to that i mean and to some degree yeah i mean yeah kinda that's there this was just a youtube video gag i wasn't even designing this for a company and so could i have come up with this game i mean could i have uh come up with a game that was as good as match this match royale game i mean in 2011 i was researching tutorials 2014 i was breaking down every match three that known you know that i could get my hands on and i'm doing all this work in between then and there and 2020 i'm making videos on games that have help features that also uh elicit emotion through advertisement stuff and in 2021 i get a deck on piggy go which has this build your city help

me feature and then and i run it i see this game hits top grossing and i was like damn dude it's one of those things where you're like come on i'm so close i'm so close like this is it man we are making free to play none of this like oh know your feature set and stuff like that of course know your feature set you know there's a lot of ceos they take podcasts and they say make and break your game faster or they say get to market quicker and know why would you build a game for a year if you don't know it works let me ask you a question what part of this do you make and break faster what part of a big ass expensive crazy marketing gnarly free-to-play experience systems ui flowing art i mean how do you take a black screen that has no r on it and then turn it into a screen with art

on it that moves around and then suddenly there's value and then i give it away for free and then somehow it comes back simultaneously a top grossing game how the hell do you do that and so there are a lot of ideas out there and i think a lot of these ideas should be totally looked at i mean i look at analytical decks if i get my hands on ones i like listening to podcasts and hearing all of the latest trends i like doing all of that but the one thing that i'm counting on more than anything and i'm just praying that it really works out for me because this isn't the end for me i still have work to do this presentation now is sort of just for fun like i'm not even a presenter i don't like writing blogs i don't like being in podcasts i just want to do the work i just want to create that result but there is a lot to gain from the entertainment information area you know building your socials

taking interviews writing those types of blogs and stuff you can earn a much higher salary and things like that but god it must be so stressful to really not know you know it feels so much better to know there are people who work on pubg and don't even know you know i don't i wouldn't even really know what to do with somebody who's from call of duty mobile joseph told me today hey man we got this guy he's a lead designer call of duty mobile i'd say whatever he can kick rocks you know i'm saying what he do i mean what time did he join what's going on i mean i got it i'm trying to figure this out and so the depth if you look at this now if you do the work and have the depth you can have the intuition to potentially make those decisions but you got to do the work and if you want to introduce a feature if you do the work and you go the distance you will know context of why the feature exists if my engineering team cannot introduce a feature i know exactly what i lose i may

not be able to put a metric to it like how somebody would probably put it but i know if we don't have a certain feature and i lose that currency that it really hurts my daily login i need to put 30 things in a 30 day login okay and some of those things are more valuable than others and some of them are trash and i can't give away value on top of value on top of value forever so if we're going to be making a feature you need to know the context and when i'm working with the team because i work so hard on my craft because i do the work training is like no problem i don't train by tyranny i'm not like hey man you need to research every garina free fire asset in the whole world which is insane i could not believe that this gentleman actually finished that research i knew it was going to be a big job but when i saw it i was like holy crap garina free fire is freaking insane look at all these screenshots i was like jesus christ their strategy i started to see it like

god their game's not that good but they got this they got every artist in the world working on this thing and so i could train because i've seen a lot of things if i have someone working on missions i could say okay you're going to be working on missions i don't have the time to do it but check out fortnite this mission was hecka good also check out this game their missions are really good we probably want to do a blah blah blah you'll know why if you do the work sure you can hire someone and you can do all those things but you need someone in your team who does this you can plan it better when my pm says hey i'm a pm i've joined the company i'm very nervous uh joseph has given me the opportunity to work here at leela i need to be successful i say i got your back i could tell you every single feature i look at this we i even we even had a designer research every single movement inside of pubg mobile this is every single movement what it's like to vault what it's like to vault tall walls what it's like to fall off something what it's like to fall off something in their perspective it's a little clip video of

a second video of some dude falling we have our own does we have our own channel on youtube where we upload these videos and that's what it looks like to fall this is what it looks like to fall from another angle doesn't somebody have to design the falling animation shouldn't there also be a landing animation now i'm not sharing this because we're going to be making a pub g game we're actually not i wouldn't even want to do that but is it my goal to make a top grossing shooter game you bet your asset is and so don't i need to know everything about shooters hell yeah i need to know more about shooters than a shooter professional knows about shooters in fact i would be suspicious that somebody who works at a professional shooter company may be actually a little lazy i with my team who's never built a shooter game might know more about the broader spectrum of shooters than somebody who claims to be a professional five plus year shooter experience veteran we are trying our best so if you go into

knowing why or planning it better or make it smaller you got to get your product out man you got to get it out the vision's already too big you gotta cut cut cut so how can you cut with context and intuition how can you make the feature better i mean i was looking at features in a live study i don't know if this is gonna load quickly this is me studying every single live feature in every single party up feature and chat feature in fortnite i studied every single chat feature in call of duty this is all my research i didn't ask anyone to do this this is all mine this is mine and i studied across apps from the craziest streaming apps from b go live to live me and many many more trying to see how friends work in instagram and tick tock and everything how can we improve the social system the friend system the party up system how do we make it better and then how do we get done well we get done with the clarity because

we have a massive amount of work ahead of us it's supposed to help us move faster now sometimes the amount of detail that i require and desire as a designer is so much that it seems kind of crippling and my pms and joseph himself will say paul you need to hurry the hell up and so i don't get extra time to do this i have to work the extra time to get the luxury to have this i don't say hey project every engineer has to wait for me we want to figure out every run animation we still have to get done so i work an extreme amount to do this it's not something i'm exactly proud of but it's something i'm just stuck in okay i don't agree with everything about the industry's work hours and work ethics i'm just a part of it and finally we make really clear docs to keep the engineers unblocked when an engineer sits down junior senior broken english

whatever you sit down on my dock it's going to be so specific and there's so many different things i do to make them specific like as far as details inside of mockups and things like that and this is what i believe what really creates the top version game at least in the areas that i've worked now i have seen hires come in from analytics and marketing and stuff and they add tremendous value but no marketer can help a game that's not done no analytics can be done to improve the performance of a game that doesn't even run or work so it takes a tremendous amount of effort in my opinion to try to figure out a free-to-play game even a casual one and i've been trying to figure it out for a long time and so i'm not here today to tell you that i know any specific um answer or any way to help your company make a top racing game but i will say that

something i miss in the industry which is i think a little bit earlier on is that there's just a lot of hard work to be done and there's no special magic in that and so i thought this was this this talk was actually kind of strange because i didn't really have a magical thing to say that was going to unlock the potential for you to help your company however big or small it is and some companies are so big they can't even work hard anymore they have too many meetings it's too slow some things are some people don't even know that this amount of work actually exists when i show some people this stuff they go what the hell like i have seen really professional people react like damn that's a lot of work man you're crazy and it's like i kind of am man like this is serious for me i really really want this i want this super bad and i don't know if leela can make a next top roasting shooter game there isn't anything that i'm

certain of that could do it except for this this is what i'm betting on and i'm i'm happy to invite analytical thinking and marketers and all those things that joseph can bring to the table and all that stuff and but for the most part i believe that to get your game to a top grossing rank in an innovative spot it's going to require depth and it's going to require work and that will bring you so much knowledge and feature understanding you i i can't even really read an article these days like i see an article and i'm like whatever you know it's old they're writing articles about a game i already seen when they went to bed i was still up when they woke up i was already awake when they talked about the feature i already saw it it was just entertainment so if you dig in hard you will find the answers you will have the context and when you bring in those professionals

you have to check if they have that depth you bring in a new hire you have to make sure they have that depth and if you don't have that depth in your company it's something you really should think about having maybe you take someone aside and say hey look when's the last time you really went the distance to understanding a feature for real and see how you can work that in personally i research games about when i can maybe about three hours to two hours three times a week uh so monday through a saturday i might do it on monday wednesday and friday and some days i do it even more and this includes recording things and it's just crazy at this point i just can't stop and so that really that's the end of my presentation which is just doing the work and um you know hoping for the best because you think about those guys who made royal match why didn't king do that i mean king had a bunch of money they had somebody they had expensive designer right

they had an expensive analysis but it uh didn't really work and they somebody else did it with just pure hard work what's up guys all right thanks for the talk paul we uh we're a little over time but we are going to start our next session with um avinash i'll let you go ahead and introduce your session and paul and i will drop off right now guys thank you guys thanks joseph [Music] [Music] you