Games London selected me as a mentor for the Game Changer 2024 cohort. I will share my experience in game design, product management and business strategy.
Author: Carsten
Survivor Fusion: Viking Gods in open beta testing
Our latest game “Survivor Fusion: Viking Gods” is now in open beta testing on Google Play in selected countries. The game has been developed by Robot Riot and is published by FDG Entertainment.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.FDGEntertainment.SurvivorFusionVikingGods.gp
“Quintana Quest” has launched
I am pleased to announce the launch of “Quintana Quest“, one of the projects I have worked on this year. This browser-based Visual Novel/Point & Click Adventure is set in 173 CE, at the frontier of the Roman Empire along the Danube River in Bavaria.
Commissioned by the Museum Quintana in Künzing, “Quintana Quest” was developed by crushed eyes media. Game art was created by Sasanpix. My role involved developing the game’s concept and narrative, turning the archaeologists’ input into a storyline that brings historical characters, events, and places to life.
The game is designed for use in secondary school history curriculums, offering a new way for students to engage with history.
As a history nerd, working on this project with archaeologists and diving deep into research was an incredible opportunity and great fun. I learned a lot. History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Many thanks to Roman Weindl, the director of Museum Quintana, for making “Quintana Quest” a reality.
The Fishing Club 3D – how to build an indie Game-as-a-Service
“The Fishing Club 3D” is the game I have been involved with from scratch since early 2013. I created the initial concept, UI design, system design, monetisation design, balanced the whole thing and then launched our baby on Facebook Canvas in late 2013 together with the other guys at Robot Riot. After launch I had to become a Facebook marketing expert. Armed with a $40 Facebook Ad-voucher I started to grow the player base, while also looking after the community and making sense of a whole lot of data. In between I also designed many new features we came up with after launch, which really made the game what it is today.
I gave the following presentation at the Digital Shoreditch festival in 2015. It gives a brief overview about how we managed to develop, launch, run and grow a successful f2p online game with no external funding.
“The Fishing Club” has launched on Facebook
After months of bootstrapping we (Robot Riot) launched our 3D fishing game THE FISHING CLUB on Facebook. A blog post on how we developed the game as a remote team without writing a single e-mail during the process will follow soon.
Documenting the future, present and past in game-as-a-service design
Game-as-a-service game design is ongoing and iterative by nature: the launch version usually only contains a core set of features. Based on your predictions and the feedback you receive from players you want to add or extend features later on. This leads to many small game design documents. A certain fractality is added by the fact that single features can also come with their own release roadmaps. This approach calls for a certain way of documentation that boils down into three steps:
Documenting the future
At this stage the feature or the whole game exists only in your head. You use written vision summaries, player stories, mockups/wireframes, flow charts and if required Machinations diagrams to communicate what the feature is all about. Documenting the future gets the development process going, which brings the feature into the present.
Instead of creating a Google document or a Wiki page for the initial documentation, start with creating a new issue in the issue tracking tool of your choice. I usually work with Jira/Greenhopper and hence will use it as an example. The issue can contain the initial feature description as detailed as necessary. Embed screenshots or link to external documents if required. The advantage is that the initial documentation does not live in a remote place somewhere in your knowledge base but right in the centre of your development and planning process – the agile planning board. Simply put the issue on the backlog, assign it to the team member you need feedback from and add others as watchers if necessary.
Initial feedback, questions and answers can be added in form of comments to get things going and to pull the feature from the future into the present. Other team members can create sub-tasks and request additional documentation. The fractality comes into play where you use Jira to create a roadmap for the feature itself and not only for the game as a whole. The issue works likes a documentation hub: step by step the issue can link to additional external documents like Google documents or spreadsheets where more detailed information can be found.
Documenting the present
When the feature enters the present it means development has started. This is also the point in time when your theories might fall apart because no plan survives contact with reality. Again it makes a lot of sense to add your findings and decisions in form of comments to the issue. Six weeks down the road someone might ask you why you went for solution A and not solution B or C. Answering that question might actually be quite difficult. Using the issue as a documentation hub can help by reading through the comments to understand the flow of thoughts at that stage.
Here are some reasons why documenting using a issue tracking tool helps the team to stay on the same level of knowledge:
- The feature is accessible straight from the agile planning board, including its documentation and external links. That helps to keep things in focus.
- You can add sub-tasks to the issue or turn it into an Epic. Again, the essential information follows the issue through the development process. There is no separation between information and process. In my experience some developers simply forget where to look for the information they need. They forget that you put that document on Google Drive a couple of weeks ago. What they do not forget is the issue they are currently working on!
- You can change the priority of the issue, add or remove watchers, assign it to other team members, resolve, reopen, and do other useful things with it. An issue works much better as an information radiator because it is more “in everyone’s face” than a Google doc or Wiki page somewhere else. This is especially helpful when you work in a distributed/remote team setup.
- Issues are also a good place to iterate over graphics and UI designs. It might take a bit of persuasion at the beginning to convince graphic artists that using an issue tracking system is helpful. The advantages become obvious quite quickly: No more searching for e-mails with feedback and screenshots. Instead everyone can follow the whole evolution of an asset via the comment stream of an issue.
Documenting the past
Congratulations! The feature has been released. Now it is time to wrap it up and finally put the documentation in a central Google Doc or on a Wiki page. Now the game design documentation turns from being a process assistant into a lore keeper. A game-as-a-service might be live for many years, so if the job of nurturing the experience moves to someone else further down the road, having a documentation of the past helps a lot. Setting up a documentation structure that makes information accessible instead of hiding it is a challenge in itself, though. While issues are volatile (they want to be closed eventually) the documentation on Google Drive or another online knowledge base is there to stay.
Game Design Workshops
2013 seems to be the year of game design workshops:
In January I talked to students at Norwich University of Arts about game design processes and how we develop games at Robot Riot.
In May I ran a workshop at Digital Shoreditch focussing on the question of how to get students coding.
That got me invited to The Big Bang London fair where I ran two game design workshops. In this format I used Scratch to develop a fully functional game prototype within 20 minutes. Although the game was incredibly simple it was perfect to give an overview of how game design processes and game development works – and what makes games fun.
I will also run similar game design workshops at the Digital Summer Camp in London.
Game-based-learning workshop at Digital Shoreditch 2013
Just two days until I will host a workshop about game based learning at this year’s Digital Shoreditch Festival. During the workshop I want to explore ways of how any game can be used to get students interested in topics like software development, technology, science, maths and arts.
Just two days until I will host a workshop about game based learning at this year’s Digital Shoreditch Festival. During the workshop I want to explore ways of how any game can be used to get students interested in topics like software development, technology, science, maths and arts.
Continue reading “Game-based-learning workshop at Digital Shoreditch 2013”
Gamified curriculum for computer science classes
UPDATE: I will give a talk about how to get students coding at the Digital Shoreditch 2013 festival.
Inspired by Ian Livingstone’s campaign to change the way computer science is taught in schools, I dreamed up my own little curriculum to get kids motivated about coding and software development. It’s pretty straight forward:
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Metrics dashboard using Google spreadsheets
At Robot Riot we needed a cheap and easy to setup metrics dashboard to access, visualize and share data generated by our first free-to-play browser game “The Big Catch“. Business analytics tools like Kontagent were way too expensive and overpowered for what we needed in the beginning. On the other hand, developing our own tool including a custom made web front-end was also not an option because of limited coding resources. So we went for a solution with an unbeatable price tag: Google Spreadsheets. In this article I want to share some of our learnings and also explain some basic metrics we track in our dashboard.
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