Designing games that gamers can play for thousands of hours | Alex Nichiporchik
Do you want to get the latest gaming industry news straight to your inbox? Sign up for our daily and weekly newsletters here .
Alex Nichiporchik is the CEO of TinyBuild, which he started with Tom Brien back in 2011 to develop and market, No Time to Explain, via Kickstarter. Over the years, Nichiporchik has picked up a lot of experience in indie and double-A game publishing, and how he’s sharing some of it.
It was a struggle but TinyBuild grew over time and published Hello Neighbor, and in 2020 it acquired the development team behind the game from Dynamic Pixels. The firm went public in 2021 on the London Stock Exchange and acquired more development studios.
The firm is focused on building a publishing and development studio focused on creating games players can enjoy for years. The Seattle-based company has hundreds of employees.
Nichiporchik gave a talk at the DevGamm gaming event in Cascais, Portugal. It had the intriguing title of “Designing games that gamers can play for thousands of hours.” I interviewed him after that.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: What was your talk about again?
Alex Nichiporchik: It’s about designing games where players can spend thousands of hours, which is a very tall order. Normally, you have like 10 levels. That is 10 hours of content for the player. You add level number 11, you added 10%. You add number 12, you add just over 9% and then you get diminishing returns on linearly designed games. And what I argue is that let’s say you have 10 systems that you have created 10 hours of gameplay in like a sandbox game like Minecraft or Rust and whatnot. And then you add system No. 11, but system No. 11 can interface with four existing systems.
Therefore, you’ve added 40% of
Read more on venturebeat.com
