Sergei Zenkin

🔖“Honkai 3rd part 2 - Is it a new game or just a new season?” 🤔💭 With such thoughts, I read news about an upcoming update. Should be good for re-engagement of old players, maybe even suitable for attracting new ones… 🔎 Developers announced massive changes with a fresh start on the planet Mars, a new main chars trio, and lots of other stuff in terms of QoL and combat polishing. Also, there is a heavy emphasis on vertical mobility and on the ability to ride a yo-yo as a transport. But most importantly, you don’t need to play or even know the original Honkai 3rd story from years of previous content to play it. Sounds cool? Probably. Or at least it seemed so at the beginning...🧐 I was interested in researching the split of old and new content: how […]

In character abilities leveling design, I've always been interested in finding an answer to the question: how to scale percentage-based buffs and debuffs? So that they look clear to the player, but also increase efficiency in a meaningful way.✏For example: — If you increase the percentage value, you will get stat inflation, power creep, and a feeling of more hardcore gameplay in the late game.  Or uselessness at the beginning of the game.— If based on specific fixed values (not the percent ones), it does not work well with targets of different types.— You can do it like in some MMORPGs, where the strength of the buff/debuff is calculated based on specific parameters of the character. But it's complicated and also old-fashioned in some ways.— A talent tree can work well, especially if the buffs/debuffs are given additional mechanics with […]

Reviving Player Engagement: Game-Changing Updates (Personal picks from F2P and Paid Games) In today's gaming landscape, keeping players engaged with older titles is a significant challenge. Successful live-ops games and “games-as-hobbies” have been around for a while now, some for years, others for a decade. Competing with them is tough, but growing and improving such projects to retain new audiences and entertain the old ones may be even tougher.A recent case with “Honkai Impact 3rd: Part Two” shows what some games have been attempting to do already for some time. They aim to boost engagement through massive updates, offering fresh takes on user experience, content, and quality of life features. Older and rapidly growing games tend to become too complex and overcomplicated. These updates seek to address such legacy, building hype around the main differences.In this post, I’ll showcase examples […]

How to build a place for “Game Design” talks in your team? Some tips for beginners. 📒😼✨ No matter if you work in a big corporation or in an indie studio, sometimes you may find yourself thinking: “it may be nice to talk about game development”. About design solutions in other games, market news, features decompositions and so on, maybe even with presenting something big in the process, like at a proper conference. And sometimes you may be in the situation when your boss wants it. For sure it should be not another local kitchen talk, but kind of “process”. I don’t have a simple answer on how to build the thing, but here some basic advice:1. Find and empower similar activities in your team. Writing articles, researching games, presenting - usually there is already somebody who is working on […]