"How To Race Squirrels" at Develop Conference in Brighton, 21st July 2011

How To Race Squirrels:
Designing and Producing Commissioned Games

Rob Davis
Director, Playniac

Develop Conference, 21 July 2011

Briefs
and

User
tes;ng
Balancing

Proposals

Concept

development
and
Game
assets
Wrap
up

wri5en
spec

Wireframes

• Use-‐cases
Paper
tes;ng

• Sta;c
wireframes

• Interac;ve
wireframes

Briefs

A perfect brief does three things well:

1.  States the project’s scale, scope and goals

2.  Deﬁnes the creative zone in which the game
design will happen

3.  Inspires a good solution

Some projects start with research…

©2008 Olympic Delivery Authority

Proposals

•  Good quality writing is critical; graphics are
important too

•  This is where you get to explain your idea – go
for it!

•  Do you fully understand what you are offering?

•  Are you conﬁdent you can deliver on time and
on budget?

•  Can you convey what your game will be like to
play?

©2008 Olympic Delivery Authority

Concept Development
•  Happens before and / or after proposal stage

•  Absorb the brief / proposal

•  Assemble expertise from our team, external
consultants, specialists and / or the client

•  Brainstorm to develop, expand and then reﬁne
ideas

•  Key stage to gather everyone’s input and feed
into speciﬁcation stages

Written Spec

•  If you’ve already written a proposal and that is
being used as is, skip this stage

•  Simply 1 paragraph to 2 pages max describing
the game

•  Good starting point to save time and risk before
creating more detailed spec

Screen grab showing attractor ﬁeld

Use-cases
•  Becomes large document that is difﬁcult to
maintain… And no one wants to (re-)read!

•  Useful for more procedural software; less useful
for most games

•  Does specify game functionality very precisely,
but leaves little room to maneuver in
implementation

•  Doesn’t give a sense of what the game is like to
play or how the game GUI might work

•  So we needed a better technique…

Finished artwork for mission select

Finished artwork for island view

Finished artwork for user dashboard

Static Wireframe
•  Gives immediate visual sense of game screens
and functionality

•  Allows some GUI design to be done early and in
an abstract manner

•  Can be assimilated easily by technical and non-
technical readers

•  Useful for design and dev teams

•  Difﬁcult to get a sense of screen ﬂow and user
interaction, so…

Finished artwork for home screen

Finished artwork for race screen – mini game

Finished artwork for race screen

User testing with Interactive wireframe

Interactive Wireframes
•  All the beneﬁts of a static wireframe

•  Clear sense of screen ﬂow and some sense of
game dynamics

•  Extremely easy to assimilate

•  Extremely useful for design and dev teams

•  Easy to maintain once set up

•  Can be used for live testing with target
audience

Sample artwork for deck of 50 game cards

Sample artwork for race track sheets

Aside: MDA model of game
design
•  Mechanics

•  Dynamics

•  Aesthetics

•  Marc LeBlanc’s game design workshop at GDC
(www.8kindsoffun.com)

•  Paper by Hunkicke, Zubek and LeBlank
(www.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf)

Paper Testing

•  Does not convey game mechanics

•  Establish game dynamics early

•  Conveys substantial part of game aesthetics

•  Easy format to reﬁne and tweak game play

•  Reﬁne game balance early

•  Fun way to test game with no code

Game assets
•  Share early and share often

•  Test with users

•  Meet with client and/or use online collaboration
tools like Basecamp to manage the
conversation

•  Be ready to reﬁne and tweak; be ready to throw
away and rework

•  “Champion the user” - keep the ﬁnished game
and the audience in mind

Detailed analysis of user data

User Testing
•  Be clear with team and client exactly what is
being tested

•  Test at several stages, from look and feel to
alpha / beta

•  Invaluable feedback direct from target audience

•  Chance for dev team, design team and client to
“see the game through new eyes”

•  Very honest – be ready for heart-warming
compliments and gut-wrenching criticism

•  A lot of analysis to be done with results

Balancing

At mission control we can tweak and tune settings in the game…

…affecting our players who are far away, perhaps 8 or more hours of
game-play in the future.
Image courtesy of NASA

Energy / stats / xp / money cycles

Google Analytics: Minutes to XP level

Google Analytics: Money at XP level

Balancing
•  Start with a system-wide strategy and the right
formulae

•  Start with paper test findings

•  Refine using the user test results

•  Refine using testing company results

•  Refine using using Google Analytics or any
other data capture techniques

•  Iterate until it’s right

Wrap up

•  This approach is the framework used for many
of our productions

•  Every project is unique

•  Sometimes one or more stages don’t apply,
sometimes they get re-ordered

•  Sometimes the whole approach goes out the
window…

Rob Davis
Director
Internships:
Want
to
get

Playniac involved?
Drop
me
a
line.

rob(at)playniac(dot)com Speaking
at
GDC
Europe
in
Aug:

"Where's
the
fun?
How
to
test

www.playniac.com your
game
before
you
build
a

@playniac thing"

www.facebook.com/RacingSquirrels
@RacingSquirrels

"How To Race Squirrels" at Develop Conference in Brighton, 21st July 2011

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