I attempt to design a game as good or better than Adventure Communist. PART 1

[Music] what's up guys it's me Britney Spears free-to-play game designer last time we spoke it was 2019 I was designing a game called zombie Inc in the hot summer in some crazy conditions in a dilapidated house there and it was fun and since then you know I designed I think I designed like six games that summer and we were about to go forward with one of them a company said they wanted to build one they were gonna give us three engineers for free before we went there I said Joseph I want to try to design a game that's as good or like adventure communist because there was a really good game and we used that game as a example of what is we considered a top-notch game design so before I move forward with this one I said I'm gonna take two to three weeks and try to figure it out I spent those weeks doing everything I could to try to design

something that's comparable meaning it says small within scope something really easy to do and has a yields a similar result as far as value and this video is that it's the journey of that and then on the last video we will go over the design something on my mind I wanted to say to the industry is that I think it's important for you to find a good reason for why you want to do this stuff a lot of people come up to me and talk about retention they want to know about monetization and I really don't know why they want to know and I've asked a young man before I was like but why you know he had all these ideas and he's drinking a beer and he's talking about free-to-play blah blah blah he had all these things to say and I was like yeah but why can I ask you a question why are you gonna get rich or something like do you own a company or do you have lots of shares in your company and he was like no well like then why why are we all talking about getting this game to be so badass or talking about our cool tricks in these weird ways and everyone's kind

of like all bravado but really no one here will be rich you know and this young guy was like you know a good point and I said well you said the reason why I bring it up is because I think you need to stronger why because he was asking me for advice and I told personally I don't think you're gonna make it you're gonna ever make a good game not because you're not good but because you don't really know why you're doing it and the reasons that you think you're doing it aren't even true for you and that's a long story but you know basically companies they have at the recruiter level they hire people and they say this is the best time to get in but usually like only 20% of shares if that are allocated to the employees and there could be hundreds of employees you'd be lucky to have 1% and CEOs will say things that we're gonna make it we're gonna get there guys this is it we're just don't mess up this is gonna be amazing but it's actually not true for a lot of everyone right like we're gonna make it is a really broad statement it doesn't it doesn't really mean that for you you know oftentimes the CEO doesn't even know your name

so it's very monetization heavy of course because founders have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to increase the value of their shares by improving you know by increasing profit so it and that's just it's great right that's how business works but the the Reg there everyone's beating the drum a monetization and getting rich so you can only assume that most people are dabbling in free-to-play because they want to get rich and the sad truth is that you probably won't be very few of you will be and even those who will be rich on the flip side of this sometimes financial motivation isn't even enough I've met guys who have all of them all of this stuff I mean they have millions of dollars spend millions of dollars on games and they have all the shares and stuff and they still didn't really have what I would consider a really strong Drive and that's ok you know everyone's different maybe they were more graceful with it you know and I think some people who are rich in the industry know that like hey you know what I am different I used to be a little bit more aggressive

but basically what I'm getting at is you need a stronger reason you need to restart a reason that's true so you got to find one if it's money and you want to make money then it needs to be true I don't think that you're ever gonna you're ever gonna you know succeed unless what your reason for doing this is true anyone who's financially motivated and they will literally become rich from working hard in this industry will probably accomplish their dream if you are motivated by making something and it is true for you what you're gonna be working on and everything is true and it's true for you then you will do it you don't need a blog an article you don't need this YouTube video don't need anything there's no secret because there's enough there's enough there's enough reason for you to do it but a false reason will never get you there like a football player that knows if he scores he won't win and it creates a lot of weak people you know I've had for a lot of my career been able to cut I got that I got there you know to come home from work and feel weak hurt by the job

fluorescent lights computer you know get my ass kicked I come sliding through door like a weakling you know I don't get to come crushing through the door feeling brave like I took on my industry or something like that so when I decided that this was something for me that it was a purpose for me and that there was no nothing that could really change that it became a way better the industry got really small for me I felt like you know what screw it this is what I want to do and this is what I'm gonna do and I will do it for nothing if even if it means nothing like I will do it for zero shares zero profit sharing sure I have financial motivation I would love that but I can't count on it it's not gonna happen you know I talked to the same guy and I was like you know hard I was working on that one project he was like yeah I was like you know me shares I had in that company cuz I have me there's like none you know was profit sharing I had he was like how much I was like none had nothing he was like damn it was like yeah but that's normal you know most people are working on a

game right now that they just hope simply launches you talk to people you say will your game be successful they'll say probably not but I hope it launches because I really could use something on my resume it's like wow you know so you need to find a reason you know and these reasons are far stronger than money unless that's what you're motivated by and then that has to be true and it could be your next thing you could say alright Paul I understand I'm at this company and I don't have any financial gains but I am financially motivated it's the next thing or something like that or whatever but whatever it is it has to be true I just don't believe in you being able to do what you want on something false so you have to have sketcher you know I have these videos you know this video right here which is kind of graphic and it doesn't have any any blood or anything like that but what we're about to see is a video of a soldier who was catapulted like 15 feet out of his the top of a vehicle because even the turret gunner

because it was if somebody came up with a suicide vehicle and exploded near them he was thrown 15 feet I think he has like two broken ribs like a broken collarbone and internal bleeding and he still has the will and the resilience to get up knows watch [ __ ] man hey get down there shooting hey come on

give me a gun give me a [ __ ] gun give me my for you my forty might mites and a gun just give me any gun start handing me [ __ ] just hang on okay they're coming for us into m4 where the [ __ ] is everybody [Music] give me an m4 man give me a [ __ ] m4

lay down buddy lay down okay oh [ __ ] my life just hang on man gonna get through this [ __ ] give me an m4 bra so he still got up you believe that that's insane it's absolutely insane now is this guy gonna be more rich know is that his company tell him hey man if you really kick butt in war you're gonna be super rich no I doubt it right in the game history it could kind of be like that people are telling you hey man if you do good good be rewarded it's not true really but even though this guy knows that is it possible that this guy is working for a company that doesn't know his name yes is it possible

that what he's doing is for reasons he can't even understand is he could he is it possible that he understands he's even a pawn in a bigger scheme that he could never understand yeah it's possible but he has reasons and he has pride right he the sense of adventure Brotherhood right things like this are strong for him and he's able to do some of the most insane performance and at night I imagine he sleeps fine and it's so admirable right and I think a lot of us need that and I invite you to find that you know I think that you'd have a much better time in this other video this guy comes home from with from from from I think his wife had a cancer treatment and three burglars home invaders break into his front door and bare fisted this guy beats the crap out of them and they all leave let's take a

look you get out of here insane and when they interviewed him in the interview they said how did you do it they interviewed him on some news a really really nice-looking news channel though the

linking of the interviews in the description below and they said how did you do it and he said my why was bigger than theirs my wife was upstairs and if you look back and think about it like that it's true it's absolutely true this guy had a bigger why than three of those guys those guys were weak sure they must have wanted the money they wanted their house they wanted to stay one of the things in his house and to rob him but they didn't want it more than he wanted him to leave and so there's a way to want something more and it to be real and I think that is the true key to success in this industry and probably any other as well and I just wanted to tell you that so I hope that you find that and that you take a look at what you're doing and why you're doing it wherever you are and whatever desk you're sitting at whatever job you're sitting at wherever company you're working at wherever company you started that you have a reason that's big enough and true for you and so just find a

strong why and have a bigger why and you know it'll be a lot easier I found my bigger y and it makes my job way better anyways so that's the pimp talk I came back from the boondocks and back to the Bay Area I slid right into my mom's house mama we wit ladies have you ran up into a man-child before or a mama's boy somebody you thought you saw him you were oh my God look at this then you got the norm and you were oh my god here's another one go home to mom go home to mama so I began to design immediately when I got back here and I

started filming the whole thing so let's just let's jump into it [Music]

[Laughter] [Music] so I decided to make some flashcards basically so I could have a go to reference of every Idol game that I seriously studied [Music]

[Music] basically what I'm doing is there's a screenshot of a major part of the game and then I write things about the game that I remembered like it's very pretty had a suitcase system had a great use of ads the Train in a newspaper feature it had map completion had a flying alien all outs of what I specifically remember about the game [Music]

so one of the reasons why I made those flashcards was because the next day I didn't have a really I didn't have a designated place to really work so I decided to spend a day in San Francisco which I felt like I really would needed since I had a crazy summer and I went to San Francisco and I worked a little bit and the rest of this this little part of the video is mostly just for visual entertainment but it also just show how

I use those index cards and some people feel like you should take a break from work like they call it active rest or something like that basically you go to the gym and then you leave and you're in you recover same thing with art you have to separate yourself from work so carrying a pocketful of flash cards isn't really in this recommendation of you know we're attracting from work to recover but for me sometimes I need to stay in the orbit and I can still enjoy a day and I can still live my life but I need to stay in the orbit of the idea or you know it's really hard to remember 15 idle games or something like that and if you had a pocket that had enough full of flash cards that just fit there nobody season there's just yours it's it's not the first time I've done it but it really does help you remember a lot about these games and since I'm trying to come up with something that is similar and

comparable it doesn't hurt you know so this video I went to San Francisco and there's really just it's really just a showcase of that [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

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you you

you after San Francisco the next day my job was to make some tasks I usually make tasks for myself when it comes to trying

to crystallize the vision of the game it's pretty simple how I do this I usually start with where I am and where I want to go I've always done this and I actually got it from a guy to be quite honored to be to be honest I got it from a guy named Joey Klein who did it he has a class called mental mastery he's not the first person to do this even James Allen of thinking Grow Rich Napoleon Hill no James Allen did as a man thinketh Napoleon Hill did Think and Grow Rich Benjamin Hardy the guy who wrote mmm what are you writing willpower is not enough and he just released another book called personality is important important personality isn't permanent a lot of authors talk about vision even guys like Mark Manson who wrote the book subtle are not giving a [ __ ] even though he doesn't agree a lot with Tony Robbins and mastermind group stuff even he has a program on his website where he talks

about getting an idea of where you want your life to be in the next five years which is the very you know it's an exercise of a vision but you can't get to your vision without knowing where you are a lot of companies don't do this it's true you know they get in a meeting room and they talk about what they want to make and I don't know no everyone wants to figure it out within an hour you know what are we gonna do let's figure out this hour then after the meeting we'll have marketers go test a couple things so what I'm doing here is I'm basically making tasks that I believe will help me understand where I'm gonna go even better so for example I'll make a task that says play the crap at adventure communist I'll make another task that says rebuild adventure communist entire UI I'll make another task that says research all of adventure communist metrics I'll make a test that says read all read every single adventure communist review another one

that says research has many theme as possible another things that says a understanding adventure communist pacing you know I would just write things down and I'll make myself do it and I don't actually have to do every task these tasks are basically like procrastination active procrastination if you will because how am I supposed to know where I'm gonna do what am I supposed to do it's like saying make a hit song and you know speaking of that there's a book called there's a book by Ableton I figured what it's called but it's like 74 solutions or something like that it's really interesting read in the beginning it says that if you don't know what to make which is you know it's fine a lot of people are kind of worried about making music because the music that they listen to throughout their lives directly influences what kind of music they're about to make so where's the

line right how do you make music if you if you're gonna sound like somebody else well it's impossible to make music that doesn't sound like somebody else if you've listened to music because you are an embodiment of your total hours of listening so where's the line between like plagiarism you know a straight up copying people and what they ask you to do is instead of using that song as a base what you can do is write down things about the song write down you know they use breathy vocals they have a male voice that's extremely loud or something it's about 120 bpm so 120 beats per minute they have a really crunchy kick and you say things like that and then you look at this list and then instead of listening to the song you're actually looking at your favorite song in a different way when I read that I thought you know why I do that a lot in game design except you know in that same book it says something about like

the level of detail that you want to get from the song varies so you can go as you can write as few things as bad of saying something like the song it has a four on the floor kick beat with really loud rock-and-roll vocals or you can go to say like it has three high hats on the eighth note and it uses a C major D G chord and you can really get details about it now for me I go extremely deep in my research but my research isn't about copying it's mostly about trying to figure out where I'm gonna go with this and how I'm gonna put my spin on it or if there's even a way out at all because sometimes when you make a game that's like another game it's hard to deter from that game or else you're making something else and the company doesn't know what you're making so for example if you want to make a match three game I mean how far can you go away from that it's probably going to look like a match three but what's the difference right so what I do is I write to myself this is what I have

I have a couple engineers or something and this is where I want to go the game is going to be mostly UI based it's gonna have adventure communist feel to it and it's gonna have revenue like that and that's where I want to go and that's enough now I know that's not enough for most companies to like make decisions and not everyone works like this because you know companies want to move move move move move but I'm a designer okay so and I work with teams of designers and this is how I would work with the team so if in walked a marketer in walk joseph' and this is how just saw Joseph when I work we start at the product level we don't start at the numbers we want to make right we don't say we want to make a hundred million dollars a year we don't start there we start with what we can conceive first and then try to see what those numbers could reach based on that right so at the product level I'm trying to decide what it is that I need to go for and what it is I have also because game design it's not like

you can do whatever you want you have to design with what's in reality so think of it like this we're about to cross the desert and I only have so much water in the desert is so big so I have to be really careful about how I make this journey I can't just design any feature I can't just do anything I want or else I won't make it so if we only have you know why would I design outside of what's realistic for the journey so game design is it's challenging like that and it's like that because it puts you in a but in a box right like people don't want to read a book that's over 75,000 words and 200 pages or something like that commonly right and then people don't want to watch movies that are 5 hours long right so you have confinement right you have to make a game you have to make your entertainment within a specific thing in order for someone to enjoy it and also there's the budget too right or else we won't make it so that's essentially what I do with every with every product that I have to think of so

if Joseph says hey we want to design a shooter game or hey I know this team and they have a match-three engine what I'll do is I'll say all right here's some things I'm gonna do to try to get to a place where I can elegantly speak my mind about this unless I have deep experience in that genre already then I could possibly speak on it so the rest of the video is actually built upon these tasks I will then try to do these tasks in the first task that I made myself was play the game so let's play the game [Music]

so the next task I got started on was something where I remade the entire UI adventure communist and this one was a way harder this is not something I see anyone else do mostly because it's it's it's kind of crazy but it's useful so let's uh let's take take a look at that

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I don't worry right now I'm not sure how I'm gonna beat it just sit I'm not sure if I'll come to a conclusion freaking

weird game and I feel like I feel kind of depressed today I think it's because I had a late late night last night playing fortnight and eating like McDonald's and playing adventure communist I've been like on a weird mode I can't seem to break it but I've been working on it all day just really slowly I talked about this some times with my friend and partner Joseph I'll tell him I worked all day and I probably did about 3 hours of anything but I've heard writers talk about that too like David Foster Wallace says he would spend eight

hours a day worrying about writing actually only writing for like an hour or two or something like that but I don't know why I do this stuff like I don't know wide as I do this like there's so many other ways to live your life there's so many other ways this is this is definitely one way to do it people stream they do vlogs they have fun I guess what's weird about games is like you would hope that the journey is something super fun you hope that it's fun so that would make it worthwhile or

else it would be really difficult if you were just trying to constantly make money all the time so it's weird in that way because I guess it's fun it does it's not sometimes it's not fun it would be fun to [ __ ] know what the [ __ ] to do right now that would be [ __ ] fun because fun in the industry isn't just making stuff you love it's also being successful that's what the [ __ ] a lot of people don't understand like free-to-play is about trying to be successful too you can't just mess around

it would be fun but this game is bigger than what these guys anticipated I asked them I said how many how many engineers do you think will have their like I had to you know some artists it's possible but my god there's a lot of little details that make this game good and now that I'm like redrawing it all and kind of looking at and isolating those things that actually make it like work I'm finding that it's some of these things are pretty expensive like this game is a live service it's not just a little game it is a little game but like if anybody on my team tried to make this game

without this kind of stuff it'd be a disaster like this is the kind of thinking it's not just me it's not like oh if somebody else did this it would come out bad but if somebody else didn't do this there'd be so much iteration so much discovery there would be so much waste because they'd be like oh I didn't know what it should be like that oh yeah I didn't notice that we'll add one of those it would just add up add up out of there to spend so much money so if I could figure this out now you could take what works and redo it in an innovate and a much cheaper way well I'm not I come I'm not a I'm not a big fan of those long days and stuff like that but you gotta understand this is like my whole career it's not just this one night because I know I'm so so you know this project barely begun and I'm already tripping out but man I am NOT a

enthusiast of the long days I actually think the long days are mostly some people don't work as long it is as they claim they do but sometimes it works like that you know and I definitely think you should take care of yourself but that's so funny I was like shouldn't leave that in there so hey it's not put that in there but that's kind of funny [ __ ] happens man you will definitely hit a wall man and it can be not fun because you are like a living being you know and even just one day can get you you know so I've been trying and I've been actually making these crazy journals over the last two or three months where I've been trying to dedicate my life to the to the free to play even heart even more I've been trying to see like how to sleep and eat to get more out of my day and stuff some interesting stuff some interesting videos to come one day can

really mess you up just one even a nine-hour day and I didn't eat and that's what it looked like you know I was I was bummed out so the next day I decided to go somewhere new I went to a college campus the San Jose University and I sat in front of this huge window and you know changed it around a little bit which was a good changes good changes that pace

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so is a huge redraw of the entire game most I think it's almost all of it and why that is nice it's because it's a some degree I can say like hey you know I designed adventure communist hey at least redesigned it right it's like learning a cover of a song in some ways but it's a lot of work that was three days I've read it's taking me that the most I did a redraw in about three weeks and I still had some to do three weeks in so some games are bigger and some games are smaller but three weeks of that is pretty crazy but um you can only understand it if you do it but it takes you from a really limited amount of

knowledge to a lot of knowledge you start to know everything about it how many art assets you'll need sound effects small particles that particle effects the little nuances that would actually make the game feel good and its really really good useful

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you and you can look at things at monthly or weekly you can look at the you know

downloads revenue over that period and then revenue per download just like the total amount of revenue that making per user can we look at adventure communist sure just remember that this is pretty good 74 cents 75 cents especially since probably most of the revenue is advertising revenue so that's probably like they're probably like a dollar fifty two dollars per user you know three million downloads 2.2 million and then you can look at it by country as well then you can see what the split out in terms of money by country as their environment top countries we want to do localization we just look here and see which countries in should look last yeah so that's really at all you don't

have any anything else that you really look at besides those two things yeah you can do add an intelligence like it like you know attempt to add that they're running that's helpful hmm weird you know these are all the ads of that you know Sun and stars all right I don't think Park is earning oh yeah I get this one all the time I

guess I get this all the time I mean she got top creatives that's probably any more useful see which ones are performing the best yeah I mean that's basically yeah it's pretty easy okay I don't think any that data is gonna help me make it better a design decision some of the some of the ads are interesting it's from a design from a design perspective like sometimes people advertise what the game isn't you know saying it's like maybe you should just design what the game isn't there cuz there's advertising yeah well what's that that's not in the game yeah that's

I mean whether that's cool though what the [ __ ] was that maybe it isn't the game that's all we have for this stepa so guys in the next stay tuned for the next episodes I'll be looking at all kinds of stuff trying to break down a good theme for the idea for the product looking at tons of free to play features I struggle with a few things that I end up meeting with my hypnotist Dan Ross he's a hypnotist slash life coach he's helped me out a bunch of mental jams helped me get back on my feet and feel even stronger I include the whole session that I had with him and so much more in this series to trying to figure out a game that is good or better than adventure communists thank you so much for watching if you liked the video please subscribe hit the bell notification so you get notifications when we upload the next one into other videos and yeah I'll see

you guys in the next episode