ieee game innovation conference 2013 - tuning mobile game design using data mining

Game Innovation Conference 2013 – Vancouver September 23-25

Tuning Mobile Game Design Using Data Mining PL Lanzi, D Loiacono, E Parini, F Sannicolo’, C Scamporlino, & M Pirovano


Traditional Game Development

•  Development of video games on traditional platforms (PC/console) follows well-de!ned best practices

•  Signi!cant portions of the overall cycle are devoted to playtest and testing

•  The !nal product is generally expected to be almost perfect and well-polished

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concept !nal

product 1-2 years


Mobile Game Development

•  Several companies follow the same development used for traditional platforms and invest 1-2 years on large projects

•  However the approach is infeasible for most mobile/indie companies which cannot sustain such a “long” cycle

•  Success in the mobile market appears not to follow established criteria

•  Long projects are perceived as too risky

•  Recent strategies favor the rapid exploration of new ideas and follow up only the more successful ones

§  Development 2-3 months (4-6 applications per year)

§  Follow up only to the most successful ones

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our experience

the task

develop one video game for Windows Phone

to participate to the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup

the challenges

short development (four months from start to end)

small user base (almost nobody we knew had a Windows Phone)

variety of platform with rather different features

secrecy! the app could not be distributed before submission


our approach

instrument the application code

to trace almost everything the users do

perform very short playtesting sessions (1-2 days)

apply data mining to the collected data to

extract typical users’ behavior to evaluate gameplay

check users’ behavior on different platforms


Bad Blood – A Serious Game About Diseases

•  Casual game for Windows phones developed during the Videogame Design and Programming course at the Politecnico di Milano

•  Bad Blood aims at spreading the knowledge about human diseases through a series of games settled in blood vessels, in the respiratory system, and in the brain

•  Five continents, in which players can select a speci!c region (e.g., West Australia) that also corresponds to a disease and thus to a speci!c scenario

•  Four game mechanics: attack, tap, survive and puzzle

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-VPhs1ywOU


Collecting Game Data

•  Our analysis focused on the two game modes with the highest interactivity (attack and tap)

•  Before playing, users were asked for age and gender

•  Code was instrumented to collect any possible information (raw data) about user behavior every 200ms

•  The raw data were then elaborated to compute several variables including

§  length and direction of the swipe gesture

§ center position of the players’ cells during collisions

§ number of opponents in every screen

§  the number of hits and misses in every seconds

§  the positions of the hits and misses

§ …

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Mining Users’ Data: Population 9


Attack Mode: Trajectory of Users’ Swipes 10


Good Taps & Bad Taps 11


Our Flawed Gameplay 12


How We Solved the Issue in Time for Submission

•  We modi!ed the gameplay before the !nal submission to the competition

•  Each level in attack mode has a random instant mini boss !ght involving bigger bacteria and viruses

•  The users has to instantly increase the !ring rate to be able to destroy the enemy before it can hit the player or disappear at the bottom of the screen

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Conclusions and Take-Home Message

•  We would never make the submission with a more traditional approach to playtesting

•  Completely Instrumenting the code helped us getting the best out of the relatively few users we could test our game with

•  The analysis of the collected data helped us

§  Improving the touch interface (and colliders’ placement)

§ Discovering a major design "aw that would have made the game boring

•  We did not win the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2012! L

•  But we won “Share Care” a major national competition for serious games devoted to blood donation and a special prize for innovation J

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Thank You! download it @ http://www.badbloodgame.net/

ieee game innovation conference 2013 - tuning mobile game design using data mining

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