benefits and struggles of lean game development
TRANSCRIPT
Bachelor in Game Design by Anhembi Morumbi3d Animator by Gnomon School of Visual Effects and Melies SchoolStarted as Game Master for MMOsGame Designer on the late Takô Online
GameFounders 4th class alumni!
HEEEY!
Developing Project Tilt: “Quake meets Mario Kart in 2D” Coming soon to Steam
Once upon a time...
Started inside a bigger studio in 2012 Critical Studio gave us mentorship and office space
Unexpected journey
HOW WEWORK
Lean Startup Methodology
Lean was introduced to us by Critical Studio since the beggning it was priority in our process
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
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
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
A metodologia do Lean nos foi apresentada pela Critical Studio
Our processlive 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
PROS CONS
Gather lots of user feedbackGet to know our audienceAnswers: risk mitigationLive and “living” gameCommunity <3Revenue possibilitiesEnough users for multiplayer
Marketing/social media puts a lot of weight on the art teamCommunity managementServer 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
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.
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 teamConstant bugfixes
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 created100k MAUactive community on facebook and discussion groups6500+ feedback e-mails
GameFoundersTrip to China via SkymobiLocal industry recognition
In the end, what makes it worth it is the players’ engagement and seeing that the game is important to them
