Game design
My experience in week one
As the title suggests, the source material this week was about Game Design. Being the first week back after the Christmas break it was a light introduction to pave the way for the focus of this module which will be to armour us with the knowledge and skills we need to create games and applications which we can apply to our first project over the next twelve weeks.
The Welcome video by Alcwyn Parker opens with a piece about Creativity and the Agile Mind and likened creativity to gymnastics in that the creative mind needs plenty of practice and training to become more agile and thus more creative. The video references the fixed and growth mindset and how improving mental agility with practice will only work if you have a growth mindset. The purpose of this introduction being to encourage us to approach each week within this module with a growth mindset and to develop our abilities through dedication and hard work. Something I very much intend to do of course.
The Introduction to Game Design video by Dom Starr was super interesting. Though I’ve been fortunate enough to work on numerous games during my professional career including, ‘Bucks Flying Adventure’, a 3D first person flying game I created nearly a decade ago for Ice Age 3 and more recently ‘Smashing Virus’, a 3D first person Shoot ‘Em Up I built in 2017 as an immersive experience for a pharmaceutical expo in Abu Dhabi, nothing I have worked on has been as part of a large scale team so the disciplines covered and the iterative pattern of development were new concepts to me, and ones that I found great joy in learning about. Specifically I was interested in the depth of consideration that goes into a game at a higher level and the separation of responsibilities between the systems, level, content, narrative and UI designers, and then how these creatives work with one another in a very agile manor to achieve the end result. What’s interesting is that I can draw parallels with the smaller games I’ve created as I can see what roles I’ve had to play in order to create them. What’s exciting is knowing that there is far greater scope to apply more consideration and push the boundaries within these disciplines which I intend to begin doing over the course of this module.
Tying this to my project
Despite having enjoyed the reading this week, arriving back to the course after Christmas to discover the content was heavily aimed at games creation was initially a touch worrying. When I think of games, I think of these in the more literal ‘arcade style game’ sense and having proactively prepared myself toward the end of last year and even more so over the last four weeks to get stuck into development of ‘Escape The App’ (last referred to as ‘Escape Room’ in this post), I was concerned that I might be forced to park this for twelve weeks and that the work I’d been doing was not going to be relevant which was not the news I was hoping for.
I was just starting starting to come to terms with this by Wednesday, and in keeping with the spirit of the message in the welcome video I was preparing myself to down tools on this and adapt to more of a growth mindset to shifting focus. However my concerns were alleviated when it was confirmed on Thursday’s webinar that a gamification app (like ‘Escape The App’) would be relevant as my development project for this module (Hallelujah). To be frank I couldn’t be more relieved about this, I’d really got behind ‘Escape The App’ since December and thrown myself into more in-depth market and audience research in order to first flex the idea’s viability as a business by understanding in great detail the market size, growth over the last five years and any other relevant metrics from player, business and financial statistics to construct a near complete business plan, and just one week ago, go on to seek proof of my hypothesis that ‘Escape Game enthusiasts want to know the best times recorded to escape the rooms they play and try to beat them’ by creating this landing page which targeting related search terms (such as ‘Escape Room’, ‘Escape Games’, etc) on Google in the London area has yielded 107 clickthroughs over 3000 impressions with over 15-20% of those signing up for updates about the app. Being the objective in my business plan was to secure 3% (836,000) of my Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM), I was feeling pleased with those results and keen to start development of the app. On top of this research, as per my SMART actions and sprint planning from from last year I have created wireframes for the key journey’s within the app and I did spend a couple of weeks over the Christmas period expanding the abstract components within my various React Native boilerplates so that I could hit the ground running with development in 2019. Oh! And of course I now have a refined name ‘Escape The App’ being that global research highlighted various terms being used to describe what we know as an ‘Escape Room’ (the former name) and thus this was seen as not translating well to a wider audience.
In short, things are moving along nicely with ‘Escape The App’ and I’m very excited about spending the next twelve weeks developing the MVP as planned. One area for improvement though, which has been highlighted by this weeks study is that I should approach all aspects of the game design (including the mechanic, the narrative, the UX / UI and the design) with a bit more agility and try to adopt the iterative development approach of design, prototyping and evaluation mentioned in the Introduction to Game Design video, complimenting this with audience research, to get right under the skin of the playable part of the application to deliver a better end result that will (hopefully) captivate my users and keep them returning for more.
Another item worthy of mention that came up during my preparation of the business plan is that I’ve identified the potential need for an advisor, someone who knows the industry better than I and can help steer the app to better facilitate the needs of my users. Though I can run my own research this is time consuming and costly, being my goal is to create a release worthy MVP in only twelve weeks the insight of an advisor would prove invaluable. I’d been working loosely with Valery Steinberg, formerly of Escape Plan, but she’s moved on from the industry so I might need to consider who this person might be. There is also potential for the advisor themselves be an investor, and to this end I should think very carefully about who this person might be.
I’ve created a SMART action to take some time to appoint an advisor:
- Making it Specific: The goal is to find an advisor for ‘Escape The App’.
- Making it Measurable: I need to find just one advisor in the industry that would be motivated to invest into and drive the idea.
- Making it Attainable: This won’t be a hugely time consuming process in man hours, but the time taken to research, meet, consider and execute on a deal will be drawn out in real time, experience tells me this process will take about three months.
- Making it Relevant: Finding the right person to bring on board will improve the outcome of the application and help with funding the development past MVP.
- Making it Time-Based: I want to appoint an advisor within the next twelve weeks.
Summary
In this post I’ve briefly summarised my experience in week one and highlighted the parts of the week’s source material that have most resonated with me. I’ve gone on to give an update of what I’ve been up to with ‘Escape The App’ and I’ve noted how learning about game design this week has inspired the way I approach the playable element of my application. Finally I’ve gone on to create a SMART action to focus myself of finding an advisor and initial investor for the app.