The game industry has seen an explosion in mainstream popularity, particularly in the last five years. Given the artistic merits of digital games has – at long last – become widely acknowledged, it’s of little surprise that so many people are looking to turn their passion for gaming into a successful career.

As with many professions, there are numerous paths a prospective game designer can take. If looking to embark down the professional tuition route, serious consideration should be given to the New York Film Academy’s game design school; the Academy offers a variety of degree programs to suit individual needs, and all of which provide a proven route from a beginner level to professional success.

While it’s outside of the scope of this post to provide an overview of them all, one program that receives an extraordinary amount of interest is the Associate of Fine Arts program.

Today, we’ll be looking at what the AFA Game Design actually is, and how it impacts on students and potential employers alike.

The AFA Degree Program
The AFA Degree in Game Design consists of two years of intensive study, spread over four semesters. As this undergraduate program is designed to act as a standalone and complete degree it its own right, it’s not intended as part of – or transfer to – a longer bachelor’s degree on completion.

As well as conveying a deep understanding of game design fundamentals, students will take part in the incorporated Game Studio course during each semester. Within these sessions the student designer will apply learned knowledge with the goal of producing a fully-functioning game at the end of each studio course.

What the Student Can Expect From the AFA Program

The program itself offers a very hands-on learning environment in which students focus on the very core of the game design discipline, including what it takes to make a truly great game. This learning objective is achieved primarily through collaborative learning, interactive workshops and expert tuition from seasoned professionals working in the industry today. As well as one-on-one mentorship from faculty staff and industry advisors, each team will be overseen by a professional game programmer while working on projects.

Weekly guest lectures, often providing insight and analysis on the state of the industry, are also provided throughout.

Although it isn’t as long as some of the other NYFA programs, the Associate of Fine Arts degree in Game Design is no less intensive. The degree is intended to get students up to a running speed from a standing stop – prior programming experience is not essential for those seeking to enroll, but familiarity with coding beforehand can increase the scope of sophistication in the games students will create while on the course.

Either way, graduates will emerge from the course with not only a reputable degree in game design but also a polished, working portfolio to aid in their subsequent job search.

What the Hiring Manager Can Expect from a Game Design AFA Graduate

Naturally, a graduate of any game design program will be able to display some semblance of design skill. The difference with an NYFA graduate is that a professional mindset and preparedness for genuine design work are taught as standard.

As the AFA Game Design program is a standalone degree, for the most part it attracts people who are extremely passionate about the craft (as opposed to people wandering into it from related disciplines such as computer science). As such, if you want to inject an incendiary amount of passion into your existing team, you could do a lot worse than hiring someone who holds an AFA degree.

In the interests of balance (and managing expectations), a recruiter is not overly likely to find a multiple-language programming wizard when looking to hire an AFA graduate. However, what they can expect is a well-rounded skillset – not just when it comes to coding, but also strong narrative storytelling, music curation, graphic design and an intuitive eye for crafting a great player experience.

With regards to the latter, the NYFA gives game design students an inherent feel for what makes a good game by teaching not just the ‘how’ of game design, but also the ‘why’. Rather than simply showing them how to blindly use the tools of the trade, students are instead taught the evolution of great game design throughout the ages and how that applies to their work today.

Learning More About the Program

Regardless of whether you’re a prospective student or an employer, there are a myriad of great reasons why the AFA Game Design degree has a reputation of quality within the industry. Whether it’s the perfect degree for the individual however comes down to personal circumstance.

To see the whole range of NYFA Game Design programs (including the Associate of Fine Arts degree), see the official online resource portal and downloadable brochure here.

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The Game: “Chess Blitz”

Let’s consider a fictional game, “Chess Blitz.” The game uses a traditional chess board and pieces, with the following alterations:

• The board starts empty, except for the King on a random tile of the first row for each player. The player has an inventory containing the standard set of pieces, plus slots for a limited amount of boosts.
• On each turn, players can make up to 5 actions: deploy pieces, move pieces according to their movement rules, or use boosts.
• Capturing a piece awards gold; equipping a boost before starting a match costs gold.
• The winning condition is to capture the opponent’s king (not just a checkmate), which awards gold.

There are three boosts:

• Bombs: When deployed on any tile, a bomb destroys the piece on it (if any) and a random number of pieces on the eight adjacent tiles. Destroyed enemy pieces do not reward gold.
• Freeze: When deployed on any tile, it freezes the pieces on that tile and the eight surrounding tiles for the next turn.
• Shadow: When deployed on any tile, shadow hides the pieces under that tile and the eight surrounding ones for the next three turns. The opposing player can neither move to nor from the shadowed area.

• These boosts, and packs of ten units of gold, appear randomly on empty tiles of the middle two rows of the board at the beginning of each turn. If a player moves a piece to a tile with a randomly dropped boost, it is equipped if there’s room available, or it disappears if there’s not. Gold is added automatically.
• Boosts or gold packs on the tiles can be destroyed by bombs; they can also be hidden with shadows, but cannot be frozen.
• The player can have several matches running asynchronously.

To get an idea of how something like this would play, Hero Academy is a good example, as this game somewhat approximates Hero Academy’s gameplay. (Please note that our example is only to illustrate the concepts discussed in this article; “Chess Blitz” is not necessarily well balanced or consistent in its design.)

The Economy

The game has the following set of parameters that define its balance and economy:

Table 1: Parameters and values of our in-game economy.

These parameters, together with the previously described rules, define the game’s balance and economy. For the purposes of this post, we will assume that they define a reasonable game experience. If you want to learn more about Game Balance, Ian Schreiber’s Game Balance Concepts is a good place to start. Also, Daniel Achterman has several posts on #AltDevBlogADay covering spreadsheet examples for content and systems design.

We will also not cover all the extensive product metrics themselves; our goal is to model and better understand the relationship between in-game parameters. For a more detailed explanation of product metrics, see Andrew Chen’s “How to create a profitable Freemium startup (spreadsheet model included!)” and Eric Seufert’s “A comprehensive free-to-play game model: revenue, DAU, virality, and retention (spreadsheet included).”

In this example, we need to classify each parameter into the following categories:

• Numbers visible to players: This defines the initial experience and sets the expectations—at least at first—of the game’s fairness and relationship among different game elements. These should change only for the player’s benefit, if at all. Otherwise players will perceive the game as “not playing fair.” In this category, the most important concerns belong to game design and UX, otherwise, you might end up with something that it’s not fun or engaging to play at all.
• Numbers invisible to players: These numbers can be adjusted after a game, or a game’s feature, launches. These are usually modeled as random variables whose distribution is typically hidden from players (Note that savvy players may guess/estimate this distribution in the long run). The hidden and random state of these variables enables game designers to  carefully tune a game post-launch without significantly impacting the player experience, at least when done within reasonable bounds.

In an actual spreadsheet, we will also examine the following sets of numbers:

• Metrics: These are the numbers that are going to be tracked, or in the case of live games, that are currently available. When the game hasn’t been released yet, these can be approximated by running simulations or multiple play-testing sessions. In the case of new features added to a live game, they can be estimated using existing metrics from similar mechanics.
• Desired outcomes: These numbers detail the desired monetization, socialization and engagement goals within the game. This set is where all business and product concerns are concretely modeled together with the game’s balance itself. Using both metrics and desired outcomes, developers can adjust their game while it is live.

These numbers and their relations can define a basic vision of the economy as a Flow Network, considering “sources” (e.g. where coins come from) and “sinks” (e.g. where money goes) of a particular resource we want to monitor (i.e., the first two sets of numbers) and the relation among them with regards to player behavior and the game’s engagement, socialization and monetization goals (the third and fourth set of numbers).

Figure 1: A simplified flow network for the game’s gold.

The players’ behavior that is measured (or in our case, simulated) through creating matches and playing against other people determines the amount of gold they can earn capturing pieces, winning matches and through random drops, all of them within the stated values for each of these actions (e.g.: inventory, rewards). Another source of gold is via purchases, a.k.a. our monetization point.

The price of our monetization point and the distribution of random drops allow us to tune the gold flow in the game (although we can also influence that indirectly by adjusting the other probabilities we previously defined).

In Figure 1, the size of the coins illustrates a particular case of relative size for gold earning among players, from the metrics, for each source. Our goal is to model this flow of both player actions and resources, considering desirable bounds for particular values of player behavior we want to monitor.

With all this information, we can construct an actual spreadsheet! Take a look at it here. In the first section (Table 2), we outline the values that exist on several interfaces of the game, show the numbers that set the expectations of players and define the core balance of the game.

Table 2: Game parameters.

Table 3 captures the random distributions or values that can be adjusted while the game is live (for the purposes of fine tuning):

Table 3: Adjustable values and distributions.

The third set (Table 4) encompasses all the metrics that we currently track to determine the status of the game’s balance and economy (Again, in our case this is a simulation of values; note that by using the “random” function, these values change in every instance of the document. Bonus points for you if you understand the reasoning behind each formula on the simulation).

Table 4: Simulated in-game metrics.

The design of an in-game economy involves decisions about which metrics to track, since you want the maximum amount of actionable information from the smallest stream of data possible. In this example we can see several metrics, some of them tied more to the overall product (e.g., DAU, invites), some of them more closely related to game design issues, such as boosts purchased and used.

Notice that we have three columns labeled “UG.” These columns stand for “User Groups,” partitioning the audience in three different sets. This is important because average values across all users tend to “hide” subtle nuances and differences in their behavior. It is a very good practice to consider at least three different segments partitioned according a quickly computable rule, such as number of consecutive active days, number of daily sessions, etc. The rules to segment players would vary greatly depending on each particular game, data sources and other practical computing reasons, such as tools available, ETL pipeline, frequency of desired reports and their calculation time, among others.
An important note about data sources: If your game is already live and you’re adding features, you can approximate future engagement based on previous player behaviors. If it’s a new game and you have data from previous games, you can do the same, adjusting accordingly for differences in gameplay, audience, platforms, etc. If you have no data at all, we recommend performing simulations that consider thorough systems design, market research and other sources of information. However, this process is beyond the scope of this post.

Finally, it’s crucial to examine the product’s goals, metrics and checks:

Table 5: Desired in-game metrics and outcomes.

In this section is where all the core economy design happens. In our example, we set minimum and maximum limits for gold, daily sessions and game invites, as examples of monetization, engagement and socialization, respectively. We also have additional columns to check if our reported values are within our expectations. These ranges should take into consideration the game funnel model you wish to have for your game, as well as the User Groups you’ve defined. You should also include any metrics goals you have for your game’s balance that are considered “healthy” for the game, such as limits on the usage of boosts, the usage of a boost relative to each other, etc. A game like this would probably require a matchmaking system, which can also be determined by the metrics regarding the players’ performance on matches.

However, this is just the beginning. A full economy design of a complete game would involve players’ progression, content unlocks and virtual asset purchasing information, dual (or multiple) currency tracking and relationship, deeper socialization metrics regarding other player actions and their currency or gameplay incentives, among many, many others. Additional questions from our example game might include:

• How can we model the inclusion of a premium currency and purchasing of premium sets of pieces?
• What would happen if we raise the limits for pieces in the inventory through purchases?
• How would it affect the game if there are no limits in the inventory, but deploying a piece costs gold?

These questions can, and should, be considered in a full economic model for our fictional game “Chess Blitz”; however, we are only looking at high-level concepts in this example. Good, tightly designed games require input from many other sources, e.g., market studies, systems design, platforms and user acquisition channels.

Interested in finding out more? Want a full economy model for your game? Write us!

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The title is very niche, so with this post I wanted to share a bit more in depth as to what a social casino game designer might help you with. Like other game designers who design for other target audiences, a social casino game designer simply focuses their game design on the casino players market. Casino game players include but are not limited to poker players, slots players, black jack players, bingo players, fantasy sports etc.

My primary goal is to make sure your social casino game integrates the psychology of casino players, casual gamer behaviors and the players wants and needs right into the fabric of your game design process. By doing this, your social casino game will provide players with the best experience possible on any device they choose. Your game will be tuned to appeal to a target audience on a psychological level while ensuring you have the highest retention and monetization rates possible in a social casino game.

• Areas a social casino game designer can help with:
• Casino branding, style guide & logo design
• Market positioning / brand extension consulting
• Optimized designs to target specific goals such as monetization, engagement, data collection etc.
• Customized social casino user experience (UX) design
• Customized social casino user interface (UI) design to be responsive on different devices
• Design audits of current games design / optimization recommendations
• Improve on products to maximize the LTV (lifetime value)
• Data analytics analysis
• Loyalty program creation / promotional strategies
• Casino game balancing & virtual economies
• Social casino marketing materials & ad creation/copy writing
• A/B testing of ad design/copy
• Design & setup of Facebook Appcenter and related social graphics
• Landing pages, Facebook chat walls, Email campaigns & other related marketing media optimization for acquisition/conversion of casino game players.
• Proposal and sales support media creation for funding/investments pitches (customize game design documents, poker rooms, slot machine concepts etc.)

There are many key elements that need to fit together to make your casino game the best it can be on a social network. The social gaming industry moves fast and having a solid working plan guided by experts in this field is a great place to start.

If you are interested or already building a social game or an online casino and need to get it on the right track, please email us with more details of your project.

Also check out this highly informative post on Sandra’s personal blog – Why Build a Social Casino?

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Call us today to find out more!

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	Pre-emptive dialog, explaining why push notes are being asked for (because default iOS dialog does not allow for text customization). A single, irresistible case for accepting push notes is presented (“notify you when your reservation is called”).

	Default iOS dialog follows immediately after pre-emptive dialog. Note how unappealing this dialog is – really doesn’t support the product at all (hence the pre-emptive dialog).

	After accepting push notes, user is taken to a fairly good-looking – and useful – reservation queue. Not only does user see reservations ticking down in front of them, but also people joining the line behind them – all numbers ticking by in real time!

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One of our clients is New Media Manitoba, the interactive industry association for that province. As part of our work with NMM – and similar to work we’ve done for years with the Ontario Media Development Corp – we provide business development leadership to emerging game studios in that province.

This means we help studios get meetings with key partners at GDC, plan for the event, and even run an invite-only GDC networking dinner where the province’s companies meet high level biz dev reps from various industry leaders. Past attendees have included Google, Amazon, EA, GREE, Zynga, Apple, Microsoft, and many other leaders (for which we’re hugely grateful!).

This type of business development work is a big part of our business and something we (especially Adrian!) enjoy immensely. We look forward to doing it again this year at GDC and if anyone out there thinks we might be able to help their organization similarly, give us a shout!

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It shouldn’t be. Yes, stealth mode sounds cool, but it hurts you more than it helps you. Here’s why:

1) Nobody wants to steal your idea.
There’s nothing more hilarious to me than when a startup CEO asks me to sign an NDA before they reveal their grand idea. In reality, the most powerful force keeping me from stealing your idea is not an NDA, but my belief that my idea is better than your own. Most people are violently assured they have the right ideas – in fact, this reality distortion field is common among CEOs. So stop believing someone will drop everything to rip off your idea – they’re probably only thinking “I hope she’s not doing MY idea!”.

2) Most people will never even hear of your startup.
Starting tomorrow, “unstealth” your startup and start spamming your social networks with App Store and landing page links as much as humanly possible. The fact is most of your intended audience (investors, customers, etc) will still never be even faintly aware of your existence. We’re all simply too self-absorbed or well-insulated to receive everything you’re broadcasting. To this day I still get Facebook friends surprised to learn I’ve moved to another country… over two years ago.

3) You leave stones unturned.
Mention your idea to someone even in passing, at the end of an email, on chat – anywhere. Don’t pass up the chance. You never know what they know or who they know or what you’ll learn as a result. Every day I am shocked at how effective this is: new leads are surfaced, competitors I didn’t know about are mentioned, or someone expresses a whole new way to view our product that hadn’t even occurred to me yet. If I had kept my mouth shut about our startup, I’d truly be “eating my own dog food.” In the same way one drinks the Kool-Aid.

4) Opportunity often takes a long time to knock.
So when you put off spreading the word about your startup, you also put off initiating the gestation period for opportunity. Practically speaking, VC investment alone can take 6-9 months to find and close, but if you wait until you need it, those nine months will seem like forever. But other types of opportunity take time to materialize too. One day your friend’s mind wanders and he comes up with the perfect person for you to talk to at ESPN. Or a former co-worker could have put you into their Q3 roadmap if he had known in Q1. Start seeding opportunity too late and you’ll run out of time before its first flowers bloom.

5) Get honest feedback when you can use it.
By telling your friends and colleagues what you’re up to, you get to hear some (very) honest feedback when you need it most – in the early stages, when course-correction costs you much less. Your friends will be candid, which helps you refine your pitch or product offering so it makes sense. And your colleagues, often strongly motivated to find the “gotchas” in your idea, will give you a good sense of the obstacles you might face getting investor or customer buy-in.

Obviously there are some people you might not want to tell, pre-launch. If someone is strongly in the competitor or potential competitor camp and the risk of telling them likely outweighs the benefit, perhaps skip that person for now. But try to avoid censoring yourself in any other way. As I said before, some of the most serendipitous connections or ideas have come from conversations that I thought would never lead to anything, startup-wise.

Be willing to have those conversations, to listen fully and to disclose as much (or a bit more) as you feel comfortable. Being unguarded about your concerns and your thought process is an excellent way to tacitly invite your conversation partner to help solve your problem. But when you attempt to appear like you’ve already got everything buttoned down, you leave little room for contribution.

And now back to working on PlayRank, our second screen sports product that launches this January. Have I told you about that yet…?

Thanks for reading,

Adrian Crook
CEO, PlayRank
Founder, AC+A

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