SERVICE SUMMARY
CLASSES:
FULL-DAY
Marie offers curated full-day classes for both foundational and advanced game design topics, aimed at specific design areas. She also offers game jams, where she guides the team through coming up with their own game pitches and presenting them for the team. Below are Marie’s pre-curated full-day programs, each crafted with a specific theme in mind. Most contain a mix of talks and exercises for optimal learning. Marie also offers to tailor a program to suit your needs. Get in touch to tell Marie more about your situation and goals and she can suggest a relevant program of sessions.
GENERAL GAME DESIGN
Sessions that go into the very building blocks and methods of game design, useful for all teams irrespective of game type. Sessions can be swapped freely to make your own custom schedule.
Game Vision
Design Pillars Evolved
What characterizes a good design pillar? Should they overlap, or stand out, or complement one another? How can they be used to inform the rest of your design? What elements bind them together to explain the full direction of the game?
Takeaway: Clear design direction
The Creative Brief
In this session, we walk through what Creative Briefs are, and how they can be used at early stages of design to align and connect your game across all design aspects – from narrative to progression to gameplay.
Takeaway: More aligned design across team
EXERCISE:
Write your Creative Briefs
Design Structure
In this talk, Marie walks through the concept of design hierarchy, and how it can be used to structure your vision to ensure your that the core aspects of your game gets to thrive and harmonize with one another, and make the game feel coherent.
Takeaway: More concise & coherent design
EXERCISE:
Structure your features
Creative Processes
Experience Goals
Experience goals help align your teams around a common reference on what each feature should feel like interacting with. They also serve as an interface and agreement between creative leadership and designers.
Takeaway: Rich, fun gameplay, a passionate team that goes that extra mile and happy stakeholders.
Level Up your design docs
In this workshop, Marie presents examples and advice on how to write design docs so they are clear, concise and inspirational. The participants then to gets to try their learnings on messy fictional documents, and gets peer feedback on their changes.
Takeaway: Write better design docs
Prototyping Efficiently
When should you prototype, how should you prototype? Should you prototype in several layers? What answers can it give? In this session we discuss the concepts fail-fast and fail-right and discuss which way of prototyping works best when.
Takeaway: Quick and solid design decisions
EXERCISE:
Make your own board game
Community & Users
Personas
Personas is a concept the industry has used for years, but what are they? How do they ‘work’? When are they useful, and how should they not be used? This session tells how to use them in the best way to make informed choices in your design, and ensure it caters to many players.
Takeaway: A more rounded game experience
Growing an esports
What does a pro player need to be able to rise to the top in your game? What tools does coaches require, and how do you ensure orgs can get enough exposure? This session goes into the features you need to ensure your game can grow a thriving esports community.
Takeaway: Making your game community-ready
The Steam Page
Workshop that discusses how Steam Pages can be used as a tool for alignment, to faster understand where your game vision is heading and to make your game stand out more. We walk through the history of Steam Pages and best practices, and then make our own mocked-up pages using a template.
Takeaway: Alignment & sharper USP’s
EXERCISE:
Make your own Steam Page
GAMEPLAY CLASSES
Sessions with specific and deep knowledge in gameplay
Core Gameplay
Gameplay Challenges
The core gameplay of everything you
have played can be deconstructed into a few reoccurring mechanics and patterns.
What are they, what do they challenge the player on and how can they be layered
combine to create deep and varied second-to-second gameplay?
Takeaway: More varied core gameplay
EXERCISE:
Model core gameplay
Building Gameplay Depth
This session explores
what gameplay depth is, from both mechanical and tactical aspects, and finds the master formula that defines it. It then walk through one of Marie’s famous models and gives examples on how you can build depth in your games that challenges players and makes the experience easy to learn but hard to master.
Takeaway: More gameplay depth
Verbs & Actions
What are the decisions that the
player takes second-to-second, minute-to-minute and hour-to-hour in your game?
What are the tools that the players at their disposal to take said actions? How
overloaded, or understimulated, is the player, in terms of both mechanics and tactics?
Takeaway: Balanced player stimulus
Multiplayer design
Unique full-day workshop on multiplayer design, going from the game mechanics all the way to how to serve a community
Combat roles & playstyles
Which common playstyles does
different players have, and how to they harmonize with different combat
archetypes, and different combat roles a player can assume? This session dives
into how you can make your gameplay flexible to allow for several playstyles.
Takeaway: More enjoyable gameplay
EXERCISE:
Design your combat roles
Player Coordination
Session focused on how your game can serve players to help them understand what’s happening in the game, promote them to follow the same decision logic and be able to coordinate their strategy.
Takeaway: Better teamplay
Social Glue
Session where we look at different ways to build and strengthen the social glue between players that both makes them want to excel, play together as well as keep coming back to the game.
Takeaway: Better retention
GAME AI CLASSES
Sessions with specific and deep knowledge in specific game features
Game AI (NPCs)
Realistic AI Behaviours
Session teaching some of my secrets in AI – a system developed that makes AI respond to player actions in immersive and realistic ways depending on both the nature and strength of the actions, the personality of said AI and its relationships with other surrounding AI.
Takeaway: More realistic AI actions
Immersive AI Expression
Player immersion rests upon the whole package of what they experience whilst ingame, – the narrative, sound, VFX, animation and so on. This session walks through my Mood System – a model that seamlessly improves the appearance and expression of an AI, in parallell to it taking actions.
Takeaway: More realistic AI expressions
Intro to Boss fight Design
Having been the feature owner and responsible designer for all boss fights on an AAA game, Marie dives into and share some of her design secrets on how she approaches their design and work with devteams to create fun, intriguing and challenging boss fights that are satisfying to beat.
Takeaway: Better boss design & process
EXERCISE:
Make your own boss fight
AI Simulation Systems
Full-day lecture on AI, going
Marie’s most advanced AI systems and
difficulty scaling. No exercises.
Essential AI combat systems
This talk unveils under-the hood knowledge of AAA combat systems. We will walk through the ‘Overmind’ – the AI Director that oversees every combat encounter. We will also discuss design principles and values to keep the right balance of autonomy, integrity and readability, and ensures your combat is both immersive, challenging and fun.
Takeaway: Make your own basic AI Director
Realistic AI Behaviours
Session teaching some of my secrets in AI – a system developed that makes AI respond to player actions in immersive and realistic ways depending on both the nature and strength of the actions, the personality of said AI and its relationships with other surrounding AI.
Takeaway: More realistic AI actions
The Adventure Director
Marie will share the architecture behind her own AI Director that expanded into an ‘Adventure Director’, an advanced spawning and objective system that oversaw all of combat in co-op games. The Director spawns the right type of NPC, at the right time and place, to ensure players have ebbs and flows in combat and keep facing a tough yet beatable challenge.
Takeaway: Make your own advanced AI spawn system
Balancing & Dynamic Difficulty
Session focused on balancing difficulty to match player choice, expectation and skill. Marie will present her toolbox of tricks to cut players some slack when facing tough game situations. The session both goes into when to use UX & hints, as to balance tactical challenges, and to tweak the actual difficulty itself for tough mechanical challenges.
Takeaway: Balance your difficulty
MORE DETAILS
Executive Summary
Marie has an Executive Summary that describes her sessions more in detail along with key sample slides. Click the link below to read it.
TESTIMONIALS
"Great experience"
The biggest help for us was definitely her extensive AI knowledge, where she shared her best practices from past AAA games she worked on. She went into several advanced topics. It was especially great to hear her thought process when creating the behaviors of enemies, and how she user tier lists when designing enemies. Her hands-on combat experience was very valuable to us, and we learned a lot from her.
After a week of bootcamp, our team is now well set to tackle our coming milestones, but her expertise could really be helpful again in the future. “
"Creativity was booming"
We found Marie easy to work with. She was responsive, flexible and tailored her program and content to our wishes. She also took the time to walk around and help everyone in their thinking, making sure no one was stuck, and even went above and beyond by spending some time playing and giving feedback on a game in development. All in all, we loved working with her and definitely want to bring her in again!"
"Nuggets of gold"
Our biggest takeaways were from the Experience Goals and Core Gameplay Challenges lectures that gave us the theory behind building engaging and varied gameplay, as well as communicating the design to your team. Thanks for the visit Marie!"
"Incredibly insightful"
Keep an eye [...] if you want to join her next masterclass, I most definitely recommend it!"
"Fantastic"
"Very comprehensive"
The webinar was a total blast. I do recommend Marie's workshops to everyone who wants to improve their design skills.“
SERVICES OFFERED
Schools & indie studios
- A full day of classes
- Tailored or pre-curated
- Online or in-person
- For up to 30 people
€1200
Incubators & funded studios
- A full day of classes
- Tailored or pre-curated
- Online or in-person
- For up to 30 people