Benefits and struggles of Lean Game Development
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The document details the journey of a game designer and developer, highlighting their educational background and the development of Project Tilt, a game that combines elements of 'Quake' and 'Mario Kart' in a 2D format. It emphasizes the use of lean startup methodology for iterative development, including the collection of both quantitative and qualitative player feedback to guide improvements. Despite facing challenges such as resource limitations and time management, the team has seen success in player engagement, with significant account creation and active community involvement.
Benefits and struggles of Lean Game Development
- 2. Bachelor in Game Design by Anhembi Morumbi 3d Animator by Gnomon School of Visual Effects and Melies School Started as Game Master for MMOs Game Designer on the late Takô Online GameFounders 4th class alumni! HEEEY!
- 3. Developing Project Tilt: “Quake meets Mario Kart in 2D” Coming soon to Steam
- 4. Once upon a time... Started inside a bigger studio in 2012 Critical Studio gave us mentorship and office space
- 6. HOW WE WORK
- 7. Lean Startup Methodology Lean was introduced to us by Critical Studio since the beggning it was priority in our process
- 8. This means everything we do is thought out as a test and released to the end-user as soon as possible How does it work? Build > Measure > Learn - Build MVPs to prove or disprove hypothesis - Validate your hypothesis with data from experiments
- 9. Build - Game has been open to the public since the first month - Built in MVP blocks - Weekly tests with the players from our tester group Each new feature is still released as an MVP Exemples: Missions, Friends, XP, Store
- 10. Measure and Learn We use this data to iterate on features and make them better according to the players’ needs GameAnalytics & database for quantitative data Facebook posts and player feedback e-mails to collect qualitative data
- 11. Our process live game on the web define identify problems, prioritize them and create a hypothesis to work on analyse feedback players’ comments on emails, facebook, etc develop build something and test internally get it out to the community marketing, customer service, community management
- 12. PROS CONS Gather lots of user feedback Get to know our audience Answers: risk mitigation Live and “living” game Community <3 Revenue possibilities Enough users for multiplayer Marketing/social media puts a lot of weight on the art team Community management Server costs (online game) Hard to plan on the long term As any process, it might not be perfect and has pretty clear pros and cons
- 13. Knowing our audience is our greatest asset And having a validated product makes us more confident “No business plan survives first contact with a customer.” - Steve Blank Knowing your user and validating your ideas makes “risks” smaller. You learn what works on your product, what doesn’t, and what you should work on first.
- 14. We lose a lot of time with activities that are not development but that are part of having a product But, that being said, IT’S NOT EASY Some important features are delayed for not being a priority We deal with too many things at once for a small team Constant bugfixes
- 15. We got success in various ways and are working to make it a financial success too In the end, IS IT WORTH IT? 850k accounts created 100k MAU active community on facebook and discussion groups 6500+ feedback e-mails GameFounders Trip to China via Skymobi Local industry recognition
- 16. In the end, what makes it worth it is the players’ engagement and seeing that the game is important to them