Through Master of the Game, we sit down with Gameloft experts to explore the craft, decisions, and lessons behind building games enjoyed by millions of players around the world.
This time, we spoke with Norbert Varga, Game Creative Director at Gameloft Bucharest, who shared with us his takes on creativity, the importance of clarity and his five principles to turn great ideas into great games.
Q1 — What’s a decision in your field that seems small but can have a huge impact on the player experience?
There are way too many, but I'll pick the "How quickly control is returned to the player after an action".
A small delay in an animation, interaction, camera transitions or piece of feedback can make a game feel responsive and satisfying or slow and frustrating. Players can usually not identify the exact reason, but they feel it immediately.
Q2 — What’s a challenge in your field that players rarely notice?
Keeping one coherent experience across hundreds of decisions made by different disciplines over a long production.
Design, art, narrative, audio, technology, production, and business needs can all pull the game in slightly different directions. When direction works, players do not see any of that. They simply experience one game. Magic :)
Q3 — In your job, what's something that matters more than people expect?
Clarity.
A brilliant idea that five people interpret differently is less useful than an idea everyone understands and can build towards to. A large part of the creative direction is creating this kind of shared language, removing unknowns/ambiguity and turning abstract things into something the team can actually use.
Q4 — What’s one lesson that completely changed the way you approach creativity?
Creativity is not just generating more ideas. It is also choosing the constraints, editing aggressively and knowing what not to build (much harder than it sounds, but it's a big part of the fun!).
Some of the strongest creative decisions are in fact acts of subtraction/simplification. Once I understood that, I stopped treating every idea as something that needs to survive.
Finally, give us your five principles to turn great ideas into great games
1. Start with the player experience, not the feature list
Before deciding what the game has, define what the player should feel, understand, and remember. Features are tools. They are not the vision.
2. Make the vision clear enough to say no
A strong vision should not only inspire ideas. It should help the team quickly understand which good ideas belong in this game, and which good ideas belong somewhere else. If everything fits the vision, the vision is probably too vague.
3. Turn abstract words into actual rules
Words like “fun” “epic” “immersive” or “social” or even "red" (as a color) can mean ten different things to ten different people. Direction needs to translate those words into clear principles the team can actually use when making decisions.
4. Prototype the biggest unknown
A prototype should answer a question, not exist just because a prototype was requested. Test the assumption most likely to break the experience. Otherwise, you may simply spend time proving that something can be built, without proving that it should be built.
5. Protect the experience, not every idea
Games are made through iteration, compromise, and occasionally killing ideas you really like. The goal is not to preserve every good idea. It is to make sure the final experience feels coherent, intentional and worth playing.
.png.webp)