Top Grossing Game Designer Reveals His Research SECRETS! | Game Design Document

[Laughter] hey hey hey hey right here dude over here by the tree what's up oh oh snap now I'm over here by this tree Oh what major editing skills dude what's up hey guys let's talk about some research video game research there's a lot of it in this industry some people make money on researching alone for example a company called liquid and grit that I know probably some of the best decks I've ever seen and they can be extremely useful and companies I feel they want to feel the need of research so they kind of put a research department in companies like as if it's just a necessary part of like the building blocks of a company they say I

need a PM I need a HR I need a design team I need a marketer and I need a researcher a Content lab or analysis team or a research department and that's all really good I wanted to talk about that a little bit and give you some some of my opinions on that and then we'll jump into some research basically research is sometimes used as like a huh let's try it again a car drove by what happens is people generally research games and they have these brilliant teams these people who are super good at making these decks and these decks are filled with basically glorified bullet points of many paragraphs and a lot of screenshots to describe specific features of a videogame so that when they present it to a specific team or an executive team or somebody who's in a position to make

decisions they can be educated better kind of like cliff notes for a book and what happens is a lot of times this information is being given to people who actually don't understand the philosophy of free-to-play what they take in is the basics so someone might show them a show somebody a very nice deck and often more and more and more executives don't actually make games and more and more and more every day we have people who are really good at business we really need these people they raise money they're super good and getting a company moving but they're not as strong in game design or a game building or game making in this case that some of these things get little lost let me explain so if somebody comes up to a bunch of guys a marketer guy you know a PM chick and this studio lead and he says this particular game here's the research the deck has says that it's a it's a very skill based game it has customizable characters it has VIP and it has live

events and everyone will say ok cool right the meeting ends and they go back and people become extremely knowledgeable in the gaming industry they start to understand the lingo in the next game they start to wonder does this have oh this game has customizable characters it must be good or we should probably put VIP in our game because it worked for them but the philosophy behind these features is lost recently a game makers fan emailed Joseph and I and he said he felt burned out in free-to-play because he had been working it for a couple years and it felt like a big money grab and he was personally just feeling a little burned out and I get it and this is where I think some of that starts to happen we start to wonder how to make our game better we research so I've been a little weary about research for a while and I kind of stay away with away from it I'll get into that to some extent I stay away from him so now these guys and these people these women is men they know about VIP but

they don't understand the philosophy behind VIP so they can walk around and knowing it's useful for a game but every game is extremely different and it doesn't always work for every game so having this research is useful but the way in which is applied is it was even more important like I said in a previous video I'll use it again because it's so good Napoleon Hill thinking Grow Rich he says knowledge is only potential power right it being able to put that knowledge into practical plans to the definite end is the real power in having that knowledge like for example the philosophy of VIP is you have points that are in an in-app transaction it adds more value to an in-app transaction it makes it more desirable and it's always there the user can count on this being there every single time and when they purchase it in a transaction it then goes to another menu in which there's many tiers and there's boosts inside these tiers

and these boosts become more strong as they level up their VIP now these booths have to work in harmony with the game design or else it really doesn't matter and generally a good VIP system from what I have seen studied and learned through experience is that it helps out okay in the beginning it starts to make a pretty good impact in the middle of your game experience and towards your end game when you're really kicking ass VIP becomes extremely useful and those who have been around a while who have gotten the holiday sales the Christmas sales have a higher VIP than others and now we have a really strong VIP philosophy that's actually working now it's not impossible to make a deck that explains this but it's often not the case that says VIP and it says users get points and it goes towards a boost page and says okay I get it but they kind of don't sometimes even though I've worked on many VIPs recently I was working on a VIP feature with an economist named Jeff Witt and I cannot recommend Jeff Witt

enough he's one of the best economists in the industry that I know of to date he's one of those rare game makers who have has had some some success some well-deserved success but remain humble and teachable and active in the industry so I'm working on this VIP and I know I'm going to arrive at the future so I start designing the menu but I realized some boosts are also on items some boosts are also in some other areas and it's starting to become too overpowering so I'm deciding what boost should go where and they're fighting each other for for space and we had to work extremely hard for a week me and Jeff to figure it out in between two of both of our expertise we actually came to a solution but it was kind of trouble in the water I was about to lose a VIP feature and the only reason I felt like I needed it was because it was on a feature list and hey research says we should do it so that's a really good example of how research should say you

should do something but you might arrive that it actually won't even matter or actually can't work for your game and unless you can really really make it work then you start to lose it's free-to-play true art form where everything works really well like clash royale for example my nephew's been playing it for years and he hasn't spent a dime but clash Royale is still a top grossing app and so that's extremely difficult task to execute you know free-to-play is not a money grab it's a very complicated piece of art that allows the customer to decide how much they're willing to spend while still being successful very very hard to do and so when we're taking in this research and we want our game to be that we want it to be a complicated piece of art with the ability to allow the customer to decide how much they want to spend and still be successful we want to shove the features in that will work and sometimes it doesn't happen it doesn't work out and then free-to-play starts to look a little funny so I think that that

problem kind of roots research and then it goes to positions of power in which it might not be able to be interpreted or or executed as properly and then we have a broken system so you know we have companies that spend millions of dollars on research take Zingo for example I'm not here to talk about their success or lack of success but we can agree that they probably spend a lot of money on research so when we have a medium-sized team and we're putting all this extra funding into research what makes us think that we're actually going to come up on top I mean Zynga doesn't have like eight top grossing apps right now you think they would know and maybe having a top grossing app isn't the the creme de la creme but we are all trying to make one game at a time and we want to make a game that works really well so if research was the answer then why is it doesn't it always work in my opinion it's because we need to understand the philosophy behind features and how they work in harmony with the game as a whole I've been researching personally for a

while and I do it one way almost every single time and it's kind of a style that's meant for somebody who's actually gonna make games and make decisions I I don't often put my research into a deck I usually just do it for myself personally and so when I see specific features or when I want to figure out a game I usually start in a certain place and I end in a certain place and it's worked for me over ten years of experience and I've worked on some you know pretty heavy hitters so I'd like to think that I kind of know how to do it and there's a plenty of analysis as professional researchers out there and I'm sure they do a phenomenal job but when we want to just do what works we want to do something that's useful for us on our own time I have a way in which I'd like to share with you that I think is actually extremely useful and this is my entire process on how to research a game effectively so it's useful for your entire career not just for the moment and how to harness those special

features and possibly understand the philosophies behind them so you can put them in your game and actually use them well and have a better outcome in the end so let's go to the desk and I'll show you how I do it all right guys so we're here at the desk I'm gonna show you a little bit about how I research we're in a very humble location it's very nice and beautiful here so you may hear some birds chirping but before I open a game I most of the time review it before I even get to it before I even open the app and when I open the app I hold that moment very sacredly so I usually record it because the first time user experience is hard to capture when you don't like try for it because oftentimes the games these days remember who you are so next time you log in it recognizes your ID of some sort and it keeps you at the last spot you were so you can't experience the tutorial over and the tutorial is so so important and you build a big arsenal of video

tutorials and it's super useful later but we'll get into that first what we're gonna do is want to go to the computer and I'll show you what I do to research a game so the first thing I do is I go to app Annie and I generally read straight to the what's new and in this case I have already opened up the page and I've uncollapse all the wets news and this may look like a simple technique but it's actually really interesting and as soon as I see something start to repeat like for example this is King's tower go ahead and take King's tower command C command F and then I press command V and it pops up and I could see okay they're adding a lot of floors to this King's tower you know I should be interested in that I do this with things are a little bit more obscure other things then I understand like adding new heroes we see that a few times more towards the bottom adding new heroes chapters I'm not sure what that is Wes I'm fairly familiar with that we'll see what they mean by that some aesthetics so some vanity and towards the top here they're really really changing the game they did King's tower a lot and up here I could see some

things that are just really new to me a new competitive feature this is unique to the game this is unique to the game it's not a feature that you can just say is common free-to-play which is used all over the place like padded VIP I'm not sure what this is but they're really going heavy in this now and that is pretty much all I'll do on this page I will check the top charts in this case this is the rank history top grossing and I did the last 90 days which he selected right here and it shows me that this game is doing really really well after that what I usually do is I YouTube the game companies spend a lot of money on power game looks and this is like a first-time look of the game so this guy's going to show us all about the game and I'm sure it'll be pretty detailed and I'll scroll through all of the first looks and I'll see how its received a lot of people you know they want to know how good a game is and you don't have to look far for that again very simple something that's not so simple that I do that I think is kind of special is I always search for a games

hacks because I have worked with companies in the past where they are selling us a game they say hey check out this game it's a really cool and I want to review their product and sure you can write a big deck on it you could say hey it's got these features it's good or bad but one time I was in the meeting and I told the guy sure your game looks beautiful it's really fun can you tell me more about the hack and where people can win no matter what just just like that and he was like yeah about that and I was like yeah tell us about that so they had some back-end things that they weren't really strong at and they could be stronger at and people were taking advantage of their product and when somebody takes advantage of a free-to-play game the community hates it and revenue is really really hit hard by that so the first couple things that I showed you that I read the what's news and I find common you know common things that are happening that what's new and then I'll check out the grossing area and then I'll check out how its received on YouTube and then I'll check out hacks now pretty simple right I'm not building a deck here I'm not trying to give this

to an executive I'm not trying to educate everyone else on it now I'm like aware of things that are really strong with the game and things that are also really wrong with the game and what people are trying to do to overcome it and trying to beat it because a good community will always try to hack your game after I've done all this I'll put this away and then I'll launch what it's called quick time with my phone plugged in to my computer usually what happens is I try that one more time I'll go to file new movie recording one of these cameras are gonna turn on and it might be facing me this freaks a lot of people out there like oh no what are you doing I come down here and I select my phone which is titled lawless and then now my phone will be mirrored on the screen very very

good tool to use for presentations in a company you'd be surprised there's a lot of apps like reflector or mirror or there's even airplay but this is actually a really handy unique like tricky way of kind of showing people the game and it's completely real-time since it's plugged into your computer now I'm using a MacBook Pro if you're the type of person who uses a PC I work with the guy before and I think he figured a way out but I really don't know what to tell you a PC guys just figure it out you could PC guys are smart so you'll figure it out now we're gonna play the game for the first time and I'm gonna go ahead and hit record sometimes I have trouble figuring this out let me know if you do you can actually get the microphone to go into the game and now it should be recording the music of the game sometimes I forget to do that no big deal music is not like always the highest priority and you can capture that much easier than a free than an experience so now we have it recording my my screen

and it's recording the sound so I'm press record so it's recording so now I'll play the game for about 30 or 45 minutes and just enjoy it and I'll just let this do its thing so let's get started [Music] we've got about 45 minutes of footage and we're gonna move to the next step so if you take a look at my computer with me let's check it out so what we have here is we actually have two recordings kind of on accident I was interrupted and the recording stopped but usually I have one but it's okay we have about six minutes on this side and over here we have about thirty four minutes this is actually kind of cool because I'm one in we have the tutorial the full tutorial on everything they did through this tutorial we can just scrub through it really easy so you could see why these videos are really useful and over here we have a very long drawn-out about

35 minutes of gameplay so just bear with me while I go ahead and take screenshots of these and then we're gonna move on to the next step which is harvesting images a lot of people what they do is they take pictures of their phone and they try to send their photos via email or airdrop them somehow and it's this big mess your phone has hundreds of screenshots and it's it's not really nice so we're going to just going to resize these to a more suitable size something smaller because we're gonna take a bunch of screenshots and now I'm going to jump into the part in which I'm gonna take many different screenshots from this that are kind of key areas and we're not going to be too judgmental of what we do we're just going to try to get a lot of it but we're not going to be too too anal about what we choose so let's let's harvest some screenshots

[Music] all right so we got a lot of screenshots now more than we need really a lot of key screens and we got a lot of we got to see the game in throat and freeze mode so we kind of understand it even deeper so now before we do anything with these screenshots let's go ahead and compress these videos so they don't take up a lot of space usually what I do is I open up a cheap compressor that I got from the app store this is the one I use a video compressor go ahead and click that open it up and we don't need these open anymore we'll close them we're gonna drag in this tutorial worried about go about half the kbps we're gonna get it really low maybe like around here it's fine just compress that we'll call this a FK toriel

[Music] all right so we compress the files so we save space in our computer because we're gonna you're going to be researching a lot of games over the course your career so we don't want that to clog you up there so now we're going to go over to my screen again and we're gonna do the next step so let's get rid of these guys these are the ones that are not compressed let's just move these to trash and we're gonna create a folder for this game called 8f kay arena and we're gonna drag everything in here now this is easier to do all this if you have a nice clean desktop alright so now we got everything in one folder and we're gonna move on to the next step which is something I call making a brick

now having screenshots is super useful we have them all the time take screenshots here take screenshots there it's it gets kind of messy you know we got to admit it what are they what are we doing with all these things so this is something I call a brick and I make it and I save it and I never change it and I always keep it and I use it I use a program called illustrator to do it it's my main program that I work in so let's open it little traitor and I'll show you how to make a brick so we're gonna open up illustrator we're just gonna open up any canvas here in a nice big blank canvas and then we're going to open this up really big and we're gonna make a huge canvas okay so let's take a little bit of art skills but this is your canvas button but if you're really determined to do a good job on your research this should be pretty easy so I'm gonna zoom out and then we're going to take our screenshots and we're to drop them all and so the cool part about this is that our screenshots are probably in order because we when you take screenshots on the computer it does

it by timestamp so the first one we took is the first one and the last one we took is the last one so we're just going to grab all of these and we're gonna drag them on to illustrator just let go so here's all of our screenshots now how to make a brick so you're going to want to use your rulers so go ahead and command R get your rulers there command R on Mac I'm not sure we're just on a PC we're gonna resize these to a small size that's still kind of legible it's a little bit too small a little bit bigger a little bit smaller okay cool now what we're gonna do is we're going to take our ruler go out to the very end of it and we're going to make a space about this big and then we're gonna grab one we're gonna it's going to snap onto the end nice and easy and you're gonna grab you're going to hold down shift grab the next one and then pull them

over we're gonna do this all the way until every single one is making a giant kind of brick like building usually I only go over about five or six but today we're gonna actually let's just do what I usually do so once you reach this one you go down grab a ruler mark your doubt and marker your down so then you can be clean so now we're going to fast forward I'm going to show you how to make this brick [Music] all right so we made a break here is almost every screen in the game perfectly laid out now we're gonna save this to our FK arena brick we're gonna

save it to this AFK arena file so now that we have the brick we have a still of every single screen shot in the game now this is a lot of work but you know when you do an outstanding job you get outstanding results you do a mediocre job you get mediocre results normal Drive we get a normal result so if you're doing normal research then you're just getting normal results this is a quite an extensive way to pull screenshots but it's extremely useful in the long run and you're gonna make a lot of games in your career so it's really nice to build this kind of library now all of these screen shots I could use in a different file that I'm gonna make and I'm gonna point out all the things about it that are special now this is the last step of my research and it's super critical because it forces me to point out every feature that I could recognize to the best of my ability and kind of be

with it for a while and if anyone were to ask me about this game I can pull out this other area where I kind of annotate every single feature in the game with just small words not many prepared like not very many big not very big paragraphs and I just kind of just show that this huge canvas of the game it's really good for me it's a super strong exercise and that's where I basically end so let's jump in and I'm gonna go ahead and start annotating this and looking at some of these features in more details but you never ever touch the brick keep the brick just like that sometimes I used to start working with the brick and checking out stuff and then later on I wish I had the screenshot so if we look back at our computer we have a massive brick we have a really nice folder here full

of everything that we need we have tutorial to scrub through really fast and I'm saying oh yes sorry this is the tutorial and we have a lot of screenshots and we can reference this forever forever so this is extremely useful plus if you check out AFK arena two years from now and their tutorial is still the same you know that their tutorial is working very well so we kind of have like a snapshot in time but now let's work on the annotation [Music]

so we're all done why the annotation is kind of nice is because you're just kind of running through and I whipped it out really fast but you're just kind of running through some of your thoughts so that if somebody were to ask you what you feel about the game and you wanted to talk about it you have something to reference and it'd be all these things like pointing at different things kind of drawing these big conclusions so now that we're done you know what what now usually the research is what we have the game is actually much larger so people would go even further so I'll be playing it as the days go by which is totally normal and usually I'll play a game so I dislike it but sometimes I try to keep lucky even if I don't like it because as we get older in the industry I think it's important that we try to remain youthful like for example many of us give up on snapchat just because we go a snapchats not for me but a lot of people use snapchat you should try to get into it so I'm gonna try to get really into it and I'm gonna save these all these in one folder and I'll have my brick I'll

have my annotations I'll have videos on it I'll be able to use those videos to show people slow motions of certain fight mechanics if we get into that or I could use it to kind of just paint a picture of something that's much larger so what do I think of the game usually this research would go to somebody and they would probably make a decision or of like just their learnings or read over the dick to learn it it's scroll through it or something like that but now that I've done it I wanted to kind of rundown of what am I generally my general feelings of it and I'll splice some of the footage in there and show you what I'll take away from this game personally and let's just jump into it but these are the 10 things about afk arena that I found from my research that I'll that I that is it worth noteworthy one I really like the guard wheel guard rail tutorial and how it pushed me back into campaign tutorials are super sketchy sometimes when engineers build them the engineers

generally don't like building them they're always on Rails this game kind of gives you the freedom to poke around but it keeps telling you hey man go keep going this way I really like that the hold-down to level up was done really well for the heroes a lot of games have problems of getting rid of currency I can make a whole video on that and it's not easy to do it well because free-to-play is it's as a fine line between taking too much from the user and helping them and we want to take currency from the user so that they don't always have it all right like they need to drain the currency it's like selling a kid a popsicle you don't want a kid to lick the popsicle for two months you want it to get to the stick eventually this game gets the kid to the stick real nice and there's so many different hero's that it just goes and goes and goes and I think that you could constantly be leveling these things up so the hold-down to level it up I think

was a really good feature I love that they did a day 2 collection that then popped open the rate app so the day to log in it says will you rate our app and it does it really well because you're not allowed to ask the user to rate the app for some sort of currency it has two options I think one of them I forget what it said but it was like praise us and one of them was like critique us or something like that but both those buttons will lead to the store and they did a really good job they did it very elegant chat throttle chats a big problem in games people talk talk talk talk talk too much and I also noticed that their chat may be some kind of web base so I think they could control it a lot and that gives them a lot of freedom and they may have gotten away with a lot of dev time by not building their own chat maybe they using a third party I'm not sure but either way the simple things that say like hey you have to chat in five seconds or you or you or you need to be a certain level or something like that they're not always as clear to do right

and when we make chat in games it's just like blah blah blah and then we have to figure out how to throttle it I thought they did a really nice job at that and they hit they hid the fact that their game is basically one big menu really well in the area that's called ran horn an area like this it has like it's basically a big glorified menu when I looked at it I was like oh is this gonna be like this big city but it was actually just a place you can press on the Gil button press on the library button and it was basically just more menus so they did a super good job at building a really deep game that looks good and kind of masking it with these fun like Saga looking progressional maps and that is such a really good technique because free-to-play isn't just about making a great game it's also about working with the team trying to make an okay game because we all don't have the money to make badass games but it ok but a game with small tech that it's really fun they did it the main area of the game

never changes position the action of the game is generally like right above right below your thumb all your characters are selected from the bottom the main button to play the game is right there in the middle and even all the tabs were lowered because I think they recognize a lot of phones are getting taller so they took this approach to putting most of the buttons towards the bottom of the game and it worked and it's not easy to do that you know a lot of UI guys and designers have problems with this we want to put call to actions in the right spot but then there's buttons on the side and on the right and on the top and for the most part everything about their game is in one place and that button is the mega drain of the entire economy the free gift right below right above the button was super confusing because there's this big battle above and on the map and it's coming what's going on I don't think anything's going on I think it's just an animation to my knowledge because when you press on the chest it tells you it'll open up in a few minutes

and it's basically just a free chest but the animation is an extreme call to action it looks like all these things are flying into it and that soon it will be yours so again it's just a nice looking button that opens up a pop-up it's so good the fact that each stage has a boss was really cool because bosses aren't easy to do I've worked with bosses before they only make sense well I think we all understand how bosses work but think of all the games out there and how many of them have bosses in them right now not many because a boss is it only works well for a game that has stages with a nice like a nice solid ending like you can't just put a boss in any game like there's no boss and subway surfers right there's no like boss and candy crush so I think they did bosses really well and people like bosses you know they want to see this badass guy and they wanna whoop his ass you know one thing that I think is is holding

this game together so don't understand it all the way but heroes lose XP to some degree they take your day they take damage and the this exists because they have a really strong Auto feature and their auto feature just allows things to just go and if there was never any like decayed to their to their to their heroes then people would just be on auto all time and never ever have a problem and not have a fun and game to manage so although the auto feature is really solid what is also really solid is kind of this you always want to use your best heroes but by using your best heroes you'll eventually arrive well you'll have to level up your lower ones so it does a really good job at like the philosophies behind this game are really pulling at each other and it's kind of like you know it's kind of like a teeter-totter in a way it's just going back and forth you're up and you're down

it feels like and other than that those are some of the key points I had on this game and I think I'm gonna give it a rating 1 out of 10 I'm gonna say that this game is about probably a strong 7 and for the reasons why is I think they use all the free-to-play features properly think is out of place like the fact that your heroes take damage it's actually welcomed and it makes sense to the theme it's not like your heroes are just dying of sicknesses the user kind of gets it and the users even I had a lot of fun leveling up my hero is really fast and it's fun to actually use this currency that you've earned not a heart not an easy thing to do I think it doesn't reuse this tech really well that's why I'm going to give it a a strong 7-2 its one mechanic and it's being used quite frequently and the developers are able to work on more while what this the the smaller areas of things that they built the main gameplay is very infinite if that is just so useful because what happens is you get

in this big race where you're always trying to make something bigger and bigger and better and better even subway servers would have a harder time doing updates in this game in some ways because maybe they have to design a track or something like that and it has to be like fun and different there's always like unity or whatever but it feels like in some ways this particular mechanic can be used so many times and it could still have its power that it's just pretty cool like even if you made it really far in this game you really wouldn't care because there's just so much more to go so they really do give you a lot Oh another reason why I like this game the last four final reason is that the menus were hella simple they were not try hards at all you know it really shows that some of the old-school techniques with like the player profile on the top left-hand corner the user name right there like a Settings button everything was very Square and kind of beige and it looked kind of like something from like five years ago or something like that but it's not from

five years ago it's here today and it's kind of cool to see that because I I'm a fan of trying to make games that are like well I love games that look great who doesn't but that's a lot of work right and so I think I just I just I just personally that was a personal thing why I liked it I like that they can actually make it cool with basic UI anyways that's how I research a game and from here I'll be able to talk to Joseph about it no problem anyways later guys [Music] [Music]