Mobile Video Game

Google Design Sprint On A Video Game

Day 1 - Setting the Stage, Understanding the Problem & Choosing a Target

The whole purpose of day 1 in a design sprint is to form a cohesive team and get everyone on the same page about the challenge we are trying to solve. So first, we took over the big conference room in the office and made sure to book it for the entire week. This allowed us to lock in a location where we could all work together, focus on what we were trying to accomplish and not worry about getting disturbed by anyone else in the office.

Day 2 - Focusing on Solutions

Day 2 was all about group brainstorming and narrowing down potential solutions we wanted to get feedback on.

Since we don’t typically design games, we wanted to start the day by getting some inspiration. In order to do this, we had a few team members facilitate some lighting demos on games that could be in the same game genre as our Atomic Pig game. This was a great exercise for our group since it allowed all of us to quickly get familiar with a lot of different games, capture what we liked/didn’t like and then get some inspiration before diving into generating our own ideas.

Day 3 - Decision Time

Our goal for day 3 was to take all the solutions from the day before and figure out which ones had the best chance of achieving our long term goal of having a fun and successful mobile game. For us that’s easier said than done. We had a ton of excellent ideas and spent the majority of the morning debating (respectfully) which solutions around game play, story and imagery were the strongest and ultimately should move forward.

Day 4 - Prototyping

At the start of this sprint we knew we were going to need to build at least one prototype of a game concept, but yesterday we decided to move forward with four different game concepts to prototype. Now this might not seem like a big deal if you haven’t developed games before. But for those that have, this seems absolutely impossible.

Day 5 - User Testing

In order to set ourselves up for success, we were planning and prepping all throughout the week. We started recruiting participants on Tuesday and as the design started to solidify, we updated and refined the interview guide every day. We also we ran a few practice interviews internally to make sure the facilitators felt comfortable with the questions and all the materials.

Video Game Evaluation

Super Breakout: Game Project Evaluation

Abstract Definition

In order to expand our game evaluation comparison to others with similar style play, we have defined the game in a more abstract form. We have broken the game down into offensive and defensive definitions. The defense goal is to prevent destruction by keeping the enemy from getting too close or getting through the line. The offense goal is to destroy the enemy target. The attacker will need to be able to control the weapon and aim it appropriately. The player will need to track the target around the screen in order to destroy it, and be able to continue tracking a single target or multiple targets until all have been destroyed. For the human, the general skills we defined above are abstract in their own context as to allow carry over into other applications.

Method

To evaluative parts of our game as a whole, we used Microsoft Saint Sharp (MSS). We modeled the game independent of the player. In doing so, we could individualize the player parameters and model the influence these parameters had on the game. To begin, we first identified the tasks for the play of Super Breakout. These tasks are 1) Identify where the bricks are to break, 2) Move the platform to projected ball location, 3) Position the paddle to shoot the ball in the desired direction, 4) Repeat until all bricks have been broken or turn ends, 5) Pay attention to the incoming message, and 6) read the message aloud while playing the game. Using these tasks, we identified the game characteristics and the human cognitive load associated with each task that we then assigned varying VACP (visual, auditory, cognitive, psycho-motor) workload parameters in our model to evaluate and distinguish a novice player from an expert player.

Result

Overall, we found the expert player’s workload demand was lower than the novice which enabled the expert player to achieve higher levels in Super Breakout. The following figures are the product of the MSS model demonstrating the VACP loads on the user during Super Breakout game play. For the novice player, figure 4 shows how lower skill ability increases the VACP demand, and figure 5 demonstrates how the expert player's increased skill level has lowered the VACP workload for the player.

Conclusion

Taking the information we have gathered, and would like to gather, our game doesn’t necessarily directly generalize to other games and humans. However, when comparing the abstracted identities of the game and human, these characteristics can be translated to evaluate other games and humans. When these definitions are abstracted enough, these characteristics can even carry over into all aspects of cognitive engineering. The foundation behind this understanding is to identify what the environment provides for the player and what the player does with that information.