What’s the problem?

The developer was unsure of how his game was fitting into the market. He was building a game that was local multiplayer only and had an emphasis on strategic gameplay.

He described the game to me and five other designers, and compared the skill level required to that of Super Smash Bros. The players that mastered the controls and the movement of Planet Cleaners were going to dominate, and it would take time and dedication to do that. The developer also told us that he is running a beta for the game and has 100+ beta testers leaving feedback.

With those things in mind, our mission was to find out:

• If there’s an audience for local-only, high-skill-gap party games.

• What makes similar games successful with their audience?

• What changes or additional features would make the experience better for players?

Outlining assumptions about the product

We got to work talking through what we assumed of our users. We created an assumption matrix to organize our thoughts and rank them based on how risky they were to build and how confident we were in the players wanting them.

We ended up identifying 5 assumptions that we felt were good focus points. These assumptions were

• players want an interesting learning curve.

• players want a game with a large skill gap.

• players want an in depth tutorial.

• players want character customization.

• players want DLC (Downloadable content).

  Although the developer would later shut down the idea of DLC due to him not knowing if it was a game that needed post launch support.

Establishing our research methods

As a group, we took our assumptions and created hypotheses to guide the direction of our research. With our hypotheses, we generated research questions and split them into different research methods.

• A competitive analysis to understand how players reacted to similar games.

• A survey would help us understand how people outside of the beta would react to the game.

• User interviews would be conducted with beta testers to get their feedback on the current build.

• A contextual inquiry would help us understand how players played the game and learned the mechanics.

Conducting an analysis of the industry

After deciding what methods we wanted to use, we split up the work. I split the work on the competitive analysis, while two other designers split the work on the survey, and the last designer worked on user interviews. After a week, we lost the designers working on the user interviews and survey and the competitive analysis wasn’t providing the information we needed.

Researching competitors wasn’t telling us why they were successful, just what they had to offer. Each game was part of a very different genre, so the fact that they were different wasn’t a valid enough argument for why they had large audiences. As a team of two we worked on re-evaluating what information we needed and where we needed to focus our time.

We decided to:

• Release a survey to non-beta testers to gauge the interest in something like Planet Cleaners.

• Complete user interviews with beta testers to understand their thoughts on the game.

• Conduct contextual inquiries to get a more in-depth understanding of how people were playing the game and to understand what makes Planet Cleaners unique.

Surveying beta testers

After reading through the survey, I organized the questions into sections and gave it a style that made it feel connected to the game. The end result was very pastel-like and clean. With styling done, I sent it to a couple of gamers and posted it to social media.

Survey Responses

I ended up getting 13 responses which was more than I expected. Having this larger pool of data to sift through helps me make more accurate judgments. I got a good understanding of what types of players we are targeting, and what they expect at launch. Our players are mostly men and are interested in a game that has addicting gameplay and is easy to learn but has a level of mastery, “similar to Super Smash Bros” as some participants mentioned.

Presenting beta to new players

(Mid Nov) I spent time playing the game to learn the rhythm of gameplay. My goal was to understand the processes and tasks that the players were going to be completing and set a control. With a control I’m able to compare my players’ actions to what we expect them to do, and adjust the game to fit the players. After having a good grasp of the game, I contacted a couple of potential players in my area. I had them start with the tutorial to get a grasp of the controls.

Tutorial Responses

After that, I asked the player to complete a couple of games against the AI. I wanted them to play the game and see what they learned on their own. Each player played about 5-6 games as I observed. I asked them questions about how difficult the AI enemies were, how difficult the gameplay was without directions, and if they had any feedback.

First Game Responses

After that, I showed the players the trailer for the game. The goal of this was to reveal features and gameplay opportunities that they may not have thought about but would learn with more extensive playtime. I set up one more game for them so they could have a chance to play with a better understanding of the gameplay. The players immediately started crashing into the enemy planets (one of the features shown at the end of the trailer)

After Trailer Responses

Overall I think these sessions went really well and the developer was very excited about receiving the feedback.

Conclusion

Overall I think our goals were achieved successful, though it could have gone smoother. Losing team members and taking on new responsibilities while juggling Lambda School and the rest of my life, wasn’t easy. I’m happy with how helpful and responsive the developer was. And I’m happy that I was able to work on a video game after years of playing them in my free time. This has even pushed me to explore my own game ideas. If I were to do anything differently, I would have liked to have access to a more updated build of the game when conducting my contextual inquiries because the game would have been more complete and may have changed some of the things that my players said. Maybe because I told them that they were playing a beta version of the game, they held off some feedback because they assumed the developer already knew about it.