This post, as you might guess, is devoted to game design and game development. I used to do client and browser games, including Action Panzar. The Mail.Ru Group is developing mobile games. This publication was conceived by me as a kind of master class based on the performances in the Technopark, where I shared my experience in organizing the process of building game design. Despite the fact that some of the material in this article is more relevant for large companies, I tried to take into account the peculiarities of game design in small studios and novice development teams.

What is a game

In the classics, psychologists define a game as an unproductive activity, in which the process itself is much more important than its result. You can agree with this or not, but there is a grain of common sense in this. Still, representing any game, we first think about the pleasure of the gameplay, and not about achieving personal goals. Children from their very birth comprehend the world through the game. In fact, this is an important part of learning, it helps people and animals to master the surrounding reality. Why do games seem interesting, exciting, why do we like them? It is inherent to us in nature that this learning process should be interesting and exciting, so that we gladly devote our time to it and comprehend certain information about the world. I am sincerely surprised that gaming technology is so rarely used in schools.

What are the attributes of the game? How can we distinguish a game from any other process? First, the game is inherent in learning. This is one of the key features. Also, the game should give the person feedback so that he receives information about what happened in the system with which he plays. Without this feedback, the game can not be. The process of the game is set much higher than the goal - that is, you can play solitaire not in order to fully collect it 25 times, but for the sake of fascinating unfolding itself. For example, the mother of one of my friends asks her daughter every day to feed her lamb on the farm. Not because she needs rams, but because she just likes to play farm.
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The game also has the concept of "interface". In computer games, everything is simple - we mean by the interface a certain environment that provides interaction between the player and the logic of the game itself - these are certain dialog boxes. On tablets - even easier. In the classical sense, if we play with physical toys, with cubes, balls, when a child tries to insert an object into a suitable hole, this is the interaction interface. That is - a kind of intermediary between the logic of the game and the understanding of its process by man. When a game designer presents how a user sees his game, this can be compared to sifting rice through a sieve. Some grains remain in the sieve, they are not sifted, and some went down. Poured - this is what the game designer thought, and sifted - this is what the players understood and saw. That is, our own prism of perception always distorts our understanding of the gameplay. Just the other day, my colleagues and I were doing so-called usability testing. This observation of the behavior of the control group of players who are not familiar with our new project. We record the movement of the eyes on the screen, the actions of the player and his emotions. The test helped us see how much the developer may be mistaken, trying to predict the player's behavior.

In addition to all of the above, any game has rules — external instructions that limit the set of actions available. And the last attribute of any game is a certain role, an avatar, that is, what a person plays. In life, he may be Vasya Pupkin, a fifth-level mechanic, and does an excellent job with his job, but in the game, he is a magician and sorcerer, kills 625 sheep in the first location, to farm the third level, and then go to Karazhan with the Sword of a Thousand Truth and punish everyone who gets in his way. In Japan, there is even a separate term for people who very much get used to a virtual role. They conducted a study and tried to compare the mechanisms that work in the head of a person with schizophrenia and playing computer games, and found some similarities. The player involuntarily begins to associate himself with some other person, transfers to her those attributes that he, perhaps, would like to see in himself, and this is also part of the game. Sometimes he sees himself in the role of several personalities, between which he can mentally switch.

What does the game teach us

First, we generate certain reactions to the events that occur in the game. You see the corridor, it has moves to the right and left - aha, so you can go there. That is, there is a formation of certain algorithms of behavior, a reaction to the environment presented in the game. The game has a so-called predetermination, that is, it teaches us logic, clear understanding, building algorithms, modeling of certain situations. The classic example game designers give is the door. If it is not locked, there is a handle on it, then the person understands that he can enter this door. If you make a door without a handle close by, this is bad. You do not want him to enter - just make a wall, and he will not enter there. After all, the player has already formed the idea that once there is a door, then you can enter it. And he will beat the door and not understand why it was not made openable, or to expect that once he will be able to open it.

You can go further - to make a very big beautiful switch next to the door. It is closed, you turn the switch, and it opens. This is perceived quite easily. Another example is a car. With this word, you imagine a means of transportation, and not 100 thousand parts that are assembled together and work thanks to the laws of chemistry, physics, and heaps of other processes. Nobody goes deeper into understanding how the car works, it is simply not necessary. In games, we use the same technique - we create images with which users have certain associations about their behavior and functions.

If everything was predetermined in the game, it would be very boring. Indeed, in the real world, much does not depend on us, and this is completely natural. Someone dropped a brick, someone gave a sixth iPhone, and someone had the same iPhone bent in his pocket. Life is a series of luck and failure. Therefore, in games there should always be an element of chance. Let's say you are a great magician and a wizard of the 80th level, who knows that now he will easily kill Vasya Pupkin himself, but Vasya Pupkin is a robber, and inflicts a critical blow from the back, ruthlessly destroying his victim. Even the weakest player should have a small chance to defeat the strongest, and the strongest should have a chance to lose. Without the element of chance, the game will turn into chess, interesting only to the hardcore audience.

Some studies show that when a person is in a state of excitement, a mechanism close to religious feelings is activated. That is, a player elevates himself above other people, as if to say: “Well, fortune smiled at me,” feeding its pride, for heaven, conditionally speaking, is favorable to it today.

What else does the game teach? Of course, the game forms an opinion, that is, educates. There are educational games for children, and ordinary games can have an educational function. But through the game, you can also convey to people your vision of the situation on some topical issues and events. What does teach, say, GTA V? You walk, you kill everyone. It's fun. It would seem that this game teaches aggression. But practice shows that, in fact, nothing of the kind: people lower their aggression in the game and in life they begin to think even more positively. The main thing here - do not play, I guess.

Game currency

Have you noticed that in games there is almost always game currency? Why? After all, it is convenient to pay in rubles. Why did they come up with this currency? In fact, it is very important. Imagine a casino. You come there, buy chips, play. It is easy to part with a chip, but oh, how unpleasant it is to take the heart out. Therefore, the same technique is used in games: in-game currency is used as chips.

Many game designers believe that the player thinks something like this: “There is some kind of service, I want to buy it. How much should I spend on it? Therefore, they make difficult courses so that the player would not like to calculate this, and he didn’t do it. In fact, only 20% of people approach this game, and the rest think the opposite, from the bill: “I have 200 rubles in my hands. What can I buy for them in the game? ”. Understanding this nuance helps to create pricing in games.

How do you imagine money? The first association is bills, coins. You do not have the idea that these are just numbers. We all think, first of all, about some kind of physical analogue of money, so when we come up with prices, we take the real pieces of paper 10 rubles, 50 rubles, 100 rubles - after which we add some fluctuations regarding these amounts. The maximum price we have up to three thousand rubles. Why three, not five, because now it is the largest bill? The average family spends about so much when it is purchased in Auchan for a week. If in Auchan he is not ready to leave more, then he is unlikely to spend significant sums in the game. Therefore, we often classify our paying players by these bills.

What is game design?

Of course, we think that we are engaged in creativity, we create worlds and heroes, but in reality we are sitting in a pile of documents, formulas, in mathematics, and we constantly invent and calculate something. One of the most important tasks of a game designer is to see the whole picture. Usually it is very difficult, because people are used to splitting everything up into parts and evaluating them individually, and then it is rather difficult to assemble them back into one whole.

What are some close, similar professions that are often confused with game design? A content manager is a person who creates quests, enters data into the admin panel, writes texts, etc. A great profession, game designer is very closely associated with it, often even doing it himself, but this is not game designer. There is a level designer - this is a person who collects mazes and dungeons from pieces, creates wonderful maps on which a huge number of mobs to make the player harder, and everything in his life was bad. This is also not a game designer. There are usability experts and graphic designers - those who invent and draw interfaces. When you see that the button is located quite uncomfortable - say “thank you” to them. There are programmers of various scripting languages ​​and databases who also work closely with the game designer, constantly help him fill the game with content, come up with the behavior of various creatures in the game, calculate the balance, but this is also not game design. There are scriptwriters who come up with an awesome plot to make it cling to emotion and drive. Yes, game design is involved in all this, but this is also a little bit different.

What then is game design and what does a representative of this profession do? No matter how much I want to say this, one of the most important things for a game designer is mathematics. Of course, this is not a mathematical analysis that students of higher educational institutions are tortured with, but all the same, it is a system of differential equations to calculate the simple combat of two characters. The characters have only two characteristics to which you can reduce everything: attack and health. If we say that a character delivers a critical hit, which doubles the attack with a probability of 50%, this is the same as his equivalent attack, on average, 150% more. Or, for example, if he has an absorption shield that reduces all incoming damage by half, it just means that the character is twice as much equivalent health. But, in fact, the trick is that this can be simplified. So the character has only one characteristic - this is power. From which you can withdraw all the others. Yes, game designers came up with all sorts of systems such as SPECIAL (strength, perception, endurance, and so on), DnD-shnye system for calculating the characteristics, a lot of stats and parameters, but the basis is always power. In World of Warcraft, this parameter is called the conditional item level, from which characteristics are calculated on objects, then on characters.

If we have coped with mathematics, then the next discipline that needs to be known and applied is psychology. If we do not understand how our player thinks, it will be difficult to make a game that he likes. Therefore, we must know at least the basics of psychology. In addition to psychology, of course, you can note logic, abstract thinking, fantasy and much more. In particular, competent written speech. It is logical that if the game designer does not have imagination, then it will be hard to invent something new.

A colleague asked me once: “Can you come up with a new game until the evening?” - “Yes, good. Let the elves be, let the elves have ears - that's all, the game is ready. ” This is practically the work of a game designer. We come to the head and say: "Let it be so," he says: "Well. Now, prove it, ”and we sit down, write a 30-page treatise, which proves why elves should have ears, drag statistics, market analysis and much more, so that they believe - yes, elf ears - that’s what project interesting to the target audience.

If you know programming, it will be a plus, because all the tasks of the project usually come from the game designer. Not from the project manager and not from the manager, for the most part they are in control. But what specifically to do in each particular feature is usually decided by the game designer, because nobody can understand how to develop this feature better than him. By feature, I mean any specifically taken element of the game - say, a resource system, craft, craft, game tasks. If you know Russian and English well, this will also be a big plus, since you will have to write and read technical documentation. Most often you will need to read in English, almost all the books on game design are written in it. It will be useful experience in usability and interface design, game designers also do this from time to time. If you are a good manager and are able to organize the work of the team, this is also a big plus. Game designers who are desperate in life and understand that their imagination has dried up, usually go to the producers, PM or managers. Although in my own experience I will say that the producer is paid less, better go to game designers. Marketing and production - this is also understandable. If you do not know how to sell your product, then it will be harder to do it.

Start of game development

The first and most important point - you need to understand, and whether you need to make a game at all. Maybe you should not bother? Why do we even make games? Usually, to answer this question, we spend a month. This is a very difficult question, because we have to understand what goals we want to achieve as a result, how much we spend on it, how much we earn on it, what are the terms. Let's say you can go to your leader, suggest a game and say: “It will be done for three years,” he will say: “Okay, fine. Here are three years for you, here are some people for you, ”but at the same time he will say:“ After three years she must earn $ 10 million a month. If this does not happen, then there is no point in taking it. ” If you tell him that you will make a game in six months, then she must earn two million dollars a month, conditionally. Therefore, game designers are always limited in time and people, working in conditions of risk.

Suppose we finally understood - yes, we want to make a game. Now we need to come up with an idea - what kind of game are we doing? Maybe we want to make a farm because we have seen how farms bring a lot of money and believe in them. Maybe we want to make a card butler or a collector like HearthStone - easily. Here we are helped by the method that Edward de Bono invented, he is called “Six Hats of Thinking”. He has books about so-called lateral shifts, and this is one of the most interesting methods. What is it? We invent six hats ourselves and in our imagination we put them on the heads of all the discussion participants. The essence of the method is that all participants think in one direction and not compete, defending their ideas. There is one participant with a blue hat - the one who controls the process. He does not interfere, he does not think, he simply guides the participants, not letting him leave the rational channel.

Then we put on, say, white - this is the hat of ideas. We all have to generate ideas. Let there be a game about the Kremlin, where cockroaches crawl and kill cats - they recorded it. Whatever delusional thought, we write everything down. Let the White House start selling mushrooms - recorded. So, we came up with the most crazy ideas, wrote down a huge pile of nonsense on a piece of paper - together we take off the white hat. Now we think what we want next. Maybe we want emotions? Maybe we want to quarrel with each other? We put on a red hat, and begin to discuss our ideas, give free rein to emotional impulses. Swear, steam released - remove the red hat.



Next, we want logic to analyze our ideas. We put on the next hat. Then you need to weed out all unnecessary ideas, put on another hat. That is, the essence of this method is to clearly separate the processes of thinking, in no case do not confuse the generation of ideas and criticism at the same time, because if one person suggests an idea and the other criticizes it immediately, then the conflict begins.

Suppose we come up with the idea of ​​the game. By the way, now I am developing a new mobile game that combines card mechanics and a strategic component. From the point of view of large publishers, $ 200 million a year is not so much money. Say, the same World of Warcraft brings about 1.5 billion dollars a year for 10 years. By the way, he ranked fourth in the world at the end of 2013 in terms of revenue before expenses and taxation. In 2014, he was actively cramped by the League of Legends, but among the classic MMORPG Warcraft still leads in revenue. I wonder what the picture will be for 2015. In 2013, GTA V was in the first place - more than $ 2 billion, but we consider its success, knowing that the game sold out once, and that's all. Yes, then the PC version, maybe add-ons, but the same World of Warcraft has maintained its income for 10 years, these are very different situations.

When we decide what games we want to make and how many they will be, we are guided by a very simple logic: how many game designers do we have that can draw this project? How many studio heads do we have? If this person makes a game that will bring 200 million, will it be good for us? Maybe we can make a game that will bring 500 million? Yes, this is good money, and the difference may not be so big, but our goal is to get the most. If we do not set very high goals, we will not get an average result. To earn 200 million dollars, we must aim for a billion. Every time we develop a new project, we have to raise the bar a lot. Therefore, to get HearthStone, you need to plan Warcraft. HearthStone itself is an interesting game, because at first there were only 12 people in the team, and by the end there were 32. Compared with the Allods Team studio or the development team of the same WoW, or other projects, 30 people are very small, “chamber ”Team, and keep it one year of development is really inexpensive. In this regard, the costs of developing HearthStone were very small, because, say, all the artworks that they have on the cards, they took from their own board card game, very well at the same time saving.

So, we have an idea, we played it in our head. Next comes the turn of the concept.

More about the concept

The goal of this stage is to form a vision, a concept document, where we will fully present all the information about our game. This will be rather brief, in general terms, much will change later, because we are not working on specific features. There is no content, no formulas, nothing, this is exactly the vision of how we see our project. What is a concept document, what main sections does it have, and why is it so cool? Immediately I will say about the terminology. In Western literature, what we call a vision or concept is called a design document. In Russian-language articles dizdokom often called a description of a particular feature or game mechanics. A concept document is written in order to understand what our game is. The very first thing in the concept is, oddly enough, to write a distribution platform. Everything depends on it. It’s one thing when you create huge AAA-class client projects, and another when you make a little mobile phone. Different budgets, different teams, different specialists, so everything starts with the choice of platform.

What are some game distribution platforms? Browser games, consoles, PC-shnye offline and online games. There are still social games, that is, we allocate a social network into a separate distribution platform. After choosing a platform, we choose a genre. Also a very important point. If you are doing an action where there will be blood, mochilo, rubilovo, then something tells me that it will be hard to play it on a mobile little screen. Maybe we will make more money if we make a farm or a logic game for mobile phones - here we have our own standards too. In recent years, the boundaries of genres greatly blurred. And now we often call not a genre, but combinations or key mechanics.

The choice of the setting greatly affects the success of the game. We conducted a study on the general audience of the Mail.Ru Group Games — about 50 million people — and obtained very interesting results. I always sincerely believed that the most popular setting is fantasy, because there are many fantasy games. It turned out nothing of the kind. The most popular setting was a jailbreak, with the most popular among female audience. This was a double shock for us. Why is that? There is an assumption that a person in a megalopolis feels small and insignificant, feels like in prison, surrounded by other people, trying to somehow escape from this. And maybe that is why he impresses the hero who escaped from prison, tore off the shackles and became free. How it really is, I do not know. However, we must use it. In second place was World War II and various fantasy settings. The most unpopular characters are the Marvell comics. In principle, it is logical. Since the age range of the audience is very wide, most of its comic book culture has not yet reached. We associate the popularity of tanks not only with the love for the setting itself, but also with the influence of large titles that have been popular lately. Anime was unpopular. Again, this is a foreign culture that is not close to the middle and older age categories. If you take only those who are under 18 years old, the popularity of anime rises sharply to 30%. The Western and Stone Ages were also unpopular, and for all categories of users. People do not want to live in caves.

What are our conclusions? If we take a toy in a popular setting, it would seem that we will get a wider audience. But there is very strong competition. It is important to remember that when making games, we do not focus on the whole range of the audience, but rather on solvent players. We are engaged in commerce. Therefore, we have to give people entertainment, so that they play with us and pay on the sly. This is a rough analogy, but it is. When we weed out all those who are not ready to pay, we saw that those same elves and orcs rose sharply up to the first place. This explains why everyone around them makes fantasy setting games. A paying audience that brings in the main money loves elves, orcs and fantasy. World War II retained second place only with a very large margin. That is, tankers also pay money.

When we decided on the genre of the setting, we move on to the most important thing - USP (unique selling points) or, in Russian, unique trade offers. This is a definition of how your game is different from others. If you can not answer this question, you can not get to answer the consumer. If a person does not understand why he should play a WoW clone, he will play the original game.

When we formulated the first three points of the concept, we answer questions about the target audience and the target market. Small studios, medium-sized studios, individual development teams can say: “Our target market is Russia,” or the States, and this will be right and good. Corporations at the level of Mail.Ru Group, Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Ubisoft can never say that, otherwise they will simply go bankrupt - too much money is invested in development. We must say: "Our target market is the whole world." We have no other options. Of course, here I am exaggerating, and we always highlight the key region under which we orient the game.

When we selected the target audience and the market, we turn to core-gameplay. This is what the game is about - basic gameplay. There are games in which there is only core-gameplay, and nothing more: no content, no graphics, no sounds, no features. For example, Tetris: you drop the cubes, and everything is fine, this is one of the most popular games in the world. When we have decided what our game is about, we can estimate the timeframe for its development and the investments that we have to make. First of all, it is necessary in order for us to think about payback, cost reduction, so that the game becomes cheaper and faster to develop. Sometimes technical concepts, say, the selected engine, are written into a concept document. Because you need to understand that it will cost something, either royalties or money, respectively, you need specialists who know how to work with the engine, and this is also taken into account. Finally, the last point is risk assessment. For this, there are proven methods of the SWOT analysis type, which allow us to make the simplest estimates. But in general it is the work of a good manager, whose tools greatly exceed the SWOT.

When we painted the concept, we must answer the question why we take this game into development. This is the question of whether a lot or a little 200 million dollars of profit per year. Yes, it is a lot, but if we could earn 500 million, then at that moment we should think about which game to choose in order to get the maximum profit. Sometimes we can create a prototype, spend three or four months of work, and then abandon the game, because in the end we realized that we would not get the money that we would like to withdraw. The task is, in fact, very difficult, because from the height of time we can always evaluate which project was successful and which one was not. , , « Warcraft, ». , Warcraft , Warcraft, . , , , . . WoW, . , Blizzard. : «, …». , , , , — , , .

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Hold

In addition to attracting us, it is important to be able to keep the audience, and everything is quite difficult. This is the main task of game designer. If marketers and producers helped us in attracting us, here we mainly think for ourselves. If the game has no exciting gameplay, then nothing will save it. If your game is strange but fun, they will play it. If it turned out with very beautiful graphics, but dull, then no matter how hard you try, no matter what daily quests you come up with, the player will leave anyway, because he is bored.

Also in the game should be replayability, that is, the ability of the player to replay the same content. Unfortunately, the content “burns out” very quickly, especially for hardcore players who have mastered the “absorption” of content. If the game has a carrot, they should be able to plant this carrot 20 times in a row and earn more. If there are dungeons or locations in the game, players should be able to play this dungeon again and again. Without replayability, the game very much loses retention. Retention is the mathematical parameter that is responsible for retention, that is, a measure of retention efficiency. It is calculated as the percentage of the audience at the end of the month relative to the audience that was at the beginning of the month, with the exception of the new, given from advertising. For example, if we had 100 people in the game at the beginning of the month, 40 were gone and 60 remained, then retention is equal to 60%. Is it good or bad? It would seem that 40% lost - terrible! In fact, it is very good. 60% is a good average for the market for client games.

In the mobile segment, everything is much worse, there is not easy to retention even for a month, it becomes less than 10%. People open a mobile phone, watch, play and immediately leave. In one mobile game, another, third - the game changes too quickly. And this is a very big problem that we create ourselves in the gaming industry. How do some reputable big tops think? There is a game, let's make another clone game, and it will repeat the success. Accordingly, some audience will go to us, we will get some of the money, everything will be cool. There are more and more games, the quality is getting lower, the market is oversaturated and the audience diversifies: people run from product to product and constantly remain unsatisfied, no game fully meets their requirements.

Therefore, we ourselves are driving ourselves into such a situation that sooner or later the games will stop working - and this has already begun. Offline games are being abandoned due to the very fact of offline. The market was filled with browsers. But they also become uninteresting for developers. Social networks are becoming less interesting for large companies in terms of income. Finally, the mobile market. He has a huge audience and great development potential. We are now actively working in the direction of the mobile market, because it allows us to accommodate a very large number of games, and this technique continues to work. But we understand that it will take 5-10 years, and the same problem will overtake the mobile market - there will be so many games that it will not be interesting.

Remember some social games. Remember was a boom? Now people are throwing social games. At the beginning, the graphics were weak there, the quality of the games was lower, but they could be more interesting due to the fact that there were few of them, there was some variety. Now there are so many social games that they all look alike, and there is nothing left to choose: new projects are buried in a huge sea of ​​similar products. However, there are projects that still work. For example, the game "Tyuryaga" from the studio "Kefir" still brings good money for the studio of its scale. But if we try to re-enter this market, to make our clone Tyuryagi, it will no longer bring such profit.

What else enhances retention other than replayability? Release updates. This is a very dangerous moment. Imagine just a game and a game with addon. It is, in fact, two different games. If you changed the mechanics and logic of the game, then these are already different products. Yes, both of them are called Warcraft, but one of them was Wrath of the Lich King, the other Mists of Pandaria. And the audience who loved to play Lich King will not necessarily fall in love with the Mists of Pandaria. The game mechanics have changed, they have become more casual, this game is no longer interesting. Therefore, from the point of view of updates, there is always a simple solution - let's introduce only new content. It always keeps the audience safe enough. Want to change the game mechanics? Open a new game. There was Lineage, became Lineage II - please, no one bothers. If you see problems in the game logic, be extremely careful when changing the mechanic. Try to answer the question: “Has your gaming logic error become a feature that holds many players?”.

And the last way is holding by operating. When producers come up with marketing promotions, events, marathons, all of this works very positively on hold. In fact, besides retention, you can still say about the lifetime parameter (average player lifetime in a project), but it is calculated as a result of retention.

Monetization

We talked about the three key tasks of game designer: attracting, retaining, monetizing players. However, we must remember that monetization happens both from the point of view of the developer (game designer) and from the point of view of the operator (producer). The developer comes up with how to make money, and the producer - how to increase them. A good producer can increase the average daily income of the project three times. The key parameter that we distinguish when monetizing is ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User), the average income per payer per month. By collecting the described values ​​from the project statistics, it is possible to completely predict its development in the near future. It is clear that the longer we make the forecast, the lower the accuracy. But at least three months in advance, we can predict quite stably. What will happen in six months or a year is harder to say. Many projects show high conversions and monetization characteristics at the start, generating good revenue. However, after six months, they may lose a significant share of the audience and lose revenues due to Hi-End Content’s lack of development, that is, the lack of classes for high-level players. Another popular reason for the gradual decline in the financial performance of many projects is the lack of protection from bots and cheat programs, whose malicious activities can have a significant impact on the gaming economy, balance and, as a result, the size of the audience and its motivation to make payments. As a result, we can get a wonderful, good project, but there will be little money in it. It should be understood that the mathematical prediction of such situations and the analysis of their impact on the game is not only possible, but also necessary at the stage of vertical section.

Player Psychology

Renowned psychologist Richard Alan Bartle in his book Designing virtual worlds described a model of player segmentation according to psychological types. He offered several options for division, but we will consider the basic, consisting of four psycho-types, since it is he who is most often used in practice in the development of gaming products. The Bartle segmentation system was based on a scale of interests. He put two axes on it: from action to interaction and from the world to the players. The type of players acting on other players has been named Killer. The name stuck in connection with the fact that Bartle formed his model in relation to multiplayer worlds, one of the components of which was the battle between the players (PvP). In games where there is no PvP, this psycho will also be present. He appreciates the excitement and competition. His motive is superiority over other players, a sense of his coolness and domination. Killers in this regard is a rather dangerous audience: everyone does not like them. As a rule, they are few: no more than 10%, but they pay the most. They are willing to pay to ensure that their iPhone was two centimeters longer.

The second group is formed by players acting on the world - they are Careerists. These are the players who most love to save wealth, resources, wealth. As a rule, it is the most numerous group, and its representatives occupy up to 40% of the total project audience. The exact figure depends on the specific game and can vary greatly for different genres. Careerists love to feel that they are rich, love to show off their wealth. Moreover, wealth is not necessarily money, resources, it can be anything: “I have the most carrots,” “My farm is the biggest”.

Those who engage in interaction with the world are conventionally called Researchers. If Killer is the least, and the Careerists are the most, then the Researchers are somewhere in the middle. Their share in the project often amounts to 30% of the total audience. Researchers are interesting because they value skills and knowledge the most. They care about the content they will learn. They are demanding for a variety of graphics, locations, the presence of Easter eggs, secrets - something that could attract attention in the game. The audience is very fertile and grateful, because it has maximum retention, it is very well maintained by the project, but only as long as there is something to explore. If the game no longer gives such opportunities, the explorer quietly begins to whine, saying that before the grass was greener and the sky bluer and everything was better. It is quite difficult for researchers to attract to the project, and this category of players pays relatively little.

The last fourth group - those who engage in interaction with the players, these are Sotsialshchiki. They like to chat in chat rooms, engage in guild activities, interact with each other and with representatives of other psycho-types in every possible way. It must be understood that no player ever clearly falls under one of these groups. We say that most of the time a player more often manifests himself in one of these roles. We set the weight of each psychotype in the player's behavior. For example, some player is 42% Explorer, 23% Killer, 25% Careerist and 10% Sotsialshchik. This means that 42% of the time a player manifested himself as a Researcher, engaging in their inherent activities.

One of the key goals of audience segmentation by psycho-types is to maximize the retention of players in the project. It is based on building the correct model of relationships between representatives of different psycho-types and building a balance in the ratio between them. For example, Killers are the most aggressive, everyone does not like them. Most of all killers do not like social workers, they just can not understand: “I came to chat in the chat. Why are they killing me for what? ” Killers also do not like the Socialists: “What do they interfere with here? Why do they exist at all? Since Killers create some kind of conflict, we must always separate them from other players. How to do it? Yes, it is easy - we create battlefields, arenas, battlegrounds. Take them out, let them kill each other, and everything will be fine. Killers calmly think about killing each other as part of a competition, but exactly until they start to lose more often than they win. Then they become uninteresting, because their dignity is wounded, and we must periodically throw up a weaker opponent to the killers. To do this, we come up with different rating systems. In chess there is an Elo system, we use it in our games. As soon as the player starts to grow, he often kills, his rating grows. He begins to meet the same strong opponents as he, which equalizes his chances of winning. The higher he moves, the stronger the enemies and less chance of winning. And vice versa: Often, the losing Killer will begin to reduce in PvP with a weaker opponent, who also often lost.

Careerists do not like Killers because they prevent them from developing. They take away their main resource - time. Killers love Careerists, because it’s usually easy to kill them, but the victim offers resistance. Researchers are neutral to Killers, consider them to be disenchanted with life by Researchers. Killers try to avoid the Explorers, because those very often, due to their understanding of the game mechanics, can defeat the Killer. How is it that some “non-killer” who never beat anyone with his PvP skills took me and killed me? This is not fair, it is wrong. He knows the game better, but Killer does not explain it, he does not want to understand it. Therefore, we try not to bring them together. Careerists often regard Explorers as failures, unable to earn money, but value them for their accumulated knowledge, if the Researcher shares with them. The Researcher sees another young Researcher in the Careerist, if he is inexperienced, or a huckster with whom it is unpleasant to deal with. The researcher knows which raid is the most effective, which carrot is longer, and therefore Careerists constantly try to find out from them the information they like to share, thus showing how clever they are.

How do social workers interact with killers? Very negative. This is one of the strongest negative connections. Social workers with Careerists are a great relationship because Careerists brag about their achievements. If the Careerist does not boast, the day is wasted. Sotsialshchik will then rattle, tell his friends: “Listen, you know, he bought the sixth iPhone, he probably has a daddy in the oil business. Here is an asshole! ” The Researcher and the Sotsialshchik are also a good connection, because the Researcher tells the Sotsialshchik about all his actions, and in his eyes thus increases his own significance. The most ideal link is the Sotsialshchik and Sotsialshchik. They do not need anyone: so they communicate, everything is fine, the game was a success. Therefore, chat, a means of communication, guilds, we always bring to a public place. Everywhere there should be a chat so that Sotsialshchiki easily find each other and interact with others. For Researchers, we always complicate things, otherwise they will not be interested. They need large spaces, difficulties, labyrinths and so on. And finally, for Careerists, we make an abundance of content: a lot of resources, money, development, achievements, what can be measured. The more in the game of mounts, pets, and so on, the longer Careerists will play with you.

Game Design Education

I cannot practically advise any books in Russian, except perhaps Edward de Bono “Lateral thinking”. In English: Richard A. Bartle, Designing Virtual Worlds, A Book of Lenses, The Theory of Fun, David Perry on Game Design and many others. The problem is that the nearest university degree in game design was available in Helsinki, so there are not so many books in Russian. From November 2014, the first Russian state education in the development and operation of games at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) started. Evening education for one year is considered as advanced training for students. Program: "Management of online gaming projects," they teach game design, monetization, marketing, and so on. If you want, you can go and study at the RealTime school intensives: study for several days in a row from 10 am to 10 pm, eat there, get a powerful flow of information. Scream School is, on the contrary, a format stretched for a longer period. Technopark and Mail.Ru Group's Technopark and Technosphere have potential for learning how to develop games. Perhaps in the future we will see seminars on game design at Moscow State Technical University and Moscow State University.

How are the game designers for games and games for game designers distributed in the Mail.Ru Group?

When determining the number of projects being developed, we are guided by understandable logic: how many people can pull a project, so many of them are in the company. We have 20 people who are able to work out and organize the development of the game - so we can make 20 games. Usually they say that there is one lead designer, either a creative director, or a senior, leading designer, studio manager, and a project is assigned to him. Along the way, he can be helped by several other game designers. A studio of 20 people usually has one game designer. If there are 100 people in Allods Team, then there will be five or six or more game designers. Roughly speaking, there are five programmers, several artists and 10-15 people of other performers and managers per game designer.

Mail.Ru Group is simultaneously developing dozens of projects. Game designers always have potential for growth. The grade system helps employees to get a higher position and salary for re-certification, maintaining motivation and interest in the work. Periodically, game designers are assigned to new projects, getting the opportunity to express themselves or to form new skills.