Game Development Team Research Articles

Creative-Rational Tensions in Game Development

In this paper, we discuss an ethnographic field study conducted with a single 8-person development team operating within an established indie game company located in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explore how members of a development team – in this case mainly programmers and designers – coordinate their design ideas and development processes. In a view that accepts “the heterogeneity of production logics within the games industry” (Kerr 2017, 76), our study of a single company in Denmark contributes new insights on organized and managed team creativity by adding to this pool of varying forms of development. The paper inquires and develops a perspective to analyse collaborative game-making within a studio workplace. We explore two formats of game development team meetings, Sprint Reviews and Sprint Retrospectives, to understand the ways in which teams work together to balance ‘creative-rational tensions’ (Tschang 2007) between given expectations and deadlines as well as personal expressive interests.

Predicting digital product performance with team composition features derived from a graph network

This paper examines video games, a form of digital innovation, and seeks to predict a successful game based on the composition of game development team members. Team composition is measured with observable features generated from a graph network based on development team information derived from individual team member work on previous games. Features include network features, such as team member closeness, success percentile, and failure percentile, and non-network features, such as the number of games published prior by the studio. We propose a novel framework using these features to predict the chance of success for new games with an accuracy higher than 92%. Further, we investigate important features for prediction and provide model interpretability for practical implementations. We then build a decision support tool that allows video game producers, and associated stakeholders such as investors, to understand how the predictive model decides, predicts, and performs its recommendations. The findings have implications for those seeking to proactively impact digital product performance through graph network-generated features of team composition, where features are directly observable, as opposed to features that are more challenging to observe, such as personalities.

Building Your Dream Team: How Indie Teams Can Form, and Thrive Together.

The majority of indie game development teams are driven by the desire to produce a blockbuster game. But there are many obstacles on the way to realizing this desire, especially in the beginning. It is possible to create a game alone, but more often than not, something genuinely amazing involves a group of talented people working together toward a similar objective. Finding the correct stakeholders is one of the biggest problems with starting an independent game development team. People with the required technical talents, such as programmers and artists, as well as those with business acumen, like marketing and finance experts, are included in this. Success depends on being able to locate these people and manage them. But after the correct individuals have been identified, it is crucial to develop open lines of communication and a common comprehension of the project's objectives and expectations. Finding the perfect people to join their team is a problem that independent game development teams frequently encounter. Attracting talented individuals to a brand-new, unproven initiative might be difficult. The attention of skilled people interested in working on cutting-edge and intriguing initiatives might be attracted through networking. There are other things to consider as well since forming a team comes with the type of game one is making, finding skilled teammates, team chemistry, conflict resolution, communication, long-term relation maintenance and leadership aspects. In general, creating and leading an independent game team is a difficult process. There is no specific method for doing this, but with a little help from others' expertise, it is possible to assemble a team of creative people who can collaborate to produce a game that is genuinely enjoyable.

Applying Scrum in A Game Development Life Cycle For Small Scale Game Project

This research aims to develop a GDLC game development life cycle that focuses on the core stages of software development process. This GDLC proposal consists of 4 stages, namely Pre-Production, Production, Testing, and Release. This proposed GDLC is expected to provide adaptive but consistent guidance for game project design. These conditions are suitable for small-scale game development teams, with small project scales, and short work periods (under 1 year).
 Pre-Production functions as the initial stage for creating the basis game design for the project linearly. Production, which is carried out using the Scrum approach, is the stage of video game development based on that previously made design. The Testing phase ensures the quality of the game through overall game testing. Lastly, the Release phase includes completing documentation for post-release planning.
 This GDLC was designed by summarizing the core stages of various existing GDLCs and SDLCs related to multimedia software development. Scrum is implemented per stage, with iteration loops starting and finishing within that stage. However, in general, this GDLC is linear. This GDLC is validated with a case study of an actual video game development to ensire its efficiency in helping game developers.

Key Aspects of Managing Game Development Teams

Key Aspects of Managing Game Development Teams

A Video Game for Entrepreneurship Learning in Ecuador: Development Study.

Games have been a part of human life since ancient times and are taught to children and adults who want to simultaneously have fun and learn. Nevertheless, in the third decade of this century, technology invites us to consider using video games to learn topics such as entrepreneurship. However, developing a serious game (SG) is difficult because everyone who forms part of the game development team requires adequate learning resources to acquire the necessary information and improve their game development skills. This work aimed to detail the experience gained in developing ATIC (Aprende, Trabaja, Innova, Conquista [learn, work, innovate, conquer]), an SG proposed for teaching and learning entrepreneurship. To develop a videogame, first, we established a game development team formed by professors, professionals, and students who have different roles in this project. Scrum was adopted as a project management method. To create concept art for the video game, designers collected ideas from various games, known as "getting references." In contrast, narratology considers the life of a recent university graduate immersed in real life, considering locations, characteristics, and representative characters from an essential city of Ecuador. In a Unity 3D video game in ATIC, the life of a university student who graduates and ventures into a world full of opportunities, barriers, and risks, where the player needs to make decisions, is simulated. The art of this video game, including sounds and music, is based on the landscape and characteristics of and characters from Cuenca, Ecuador. The game aims to teach entrepreneurs the mechanisms and processes to form their businesses. Thus, we developed the following elements of an SG: (1) world, (2) objects, (3) agents, and (4) events. The narrative, mechanics, and art of video games are relevant. However, project management tools such as leaderboards and appointments are crucial to influencing individuals' decision to continue to play, or not play, an SG. Developing a serious video game is not an easy task. It was essential to consider many factors, such as the video game audience, needs of learning, context, similarities with the real world, narrative, game mechanics, game art, and game sounds. However, overall, the primary purpose of a serious video game is to transmit knowledge in a fun way and to give adequate and timely feedback to the gamer. Finally, nothing is possible if the members of game development team are not satisfied with the project and not clear about their roles.

Premortems in Game Development Teams: Impact and Potential

Software design teams need methods to evaluate plans as part of agile development processes. The premortem is a cognitive, structured, analytic technique that supports team plan evaluation and re-planning. Few empirical or longitudinal studies involving premortems exist. Ten game development teams (n=68 members) conducted premortems early on during a year-long game development project. Teams provided initial ratings of their game design plan, then conducted a premortem, and revised their plans. In the premortems, teams identified 17.8 unique reasons on average for project failure and 16.7 mitigations to those failures. Reasons for project failure focused mainly on game design execution, team communication, and game complexity (e.g., too many levels, branching). While most teams identified solutions for these challenges, surprisingly few teams revised their plans to scale back the game design complexity.

Evaluation of Stratified K-Fold Cross Validation for Predicting Bug Severity in Game Review Classification

Steam review data provided a lot of information for the game development team, either positive or negative review. It contained an essential point that negative and positive reviews provide crucial information and 7% of positive reviews contained bug reports. These bug reports occurred after the game was released, and many reports of common incidents still exist. If players found an issue in the game, they could report it directly through the review feature provided by the online game platform. Nevertheless, the development team took a long time manually analyzing and categorizing the game review. This study proposed a new approach to automatically categorizing game reviews on Steam based on the bug severity level. Hence, to solve this problem, we suggested introducing a solution based on the research background indicated above. For this experiment, we analyzed reviews on two popular game titles namely, FIFA 23 and Apex Legends. We implemented three different classifiers namely, KNN, Decision Tree, and Naïve Bayes, which would be used to train a dataset to classify the bug severity level. Due to an imbalanced dataset, we performed cross-validation to reduce bias in the dataset. Performance in this model would be evaluated using accuracy rate, precision, recall, and F1 score. As a result, the experiment showed that game reviews of different game titles achieved different accuracy scores. The game review classification for FIFA 23 performed better than the game review classification for Apex Legends. The mean accuracy score of FIFA 23 was 72% with Decision Tree and Apex Legend was 64% with KNN.

Participatory Design and Process Testing to Optimize Utility, Usability, and Acceptability of a Mobile Game for Promoting Evidence-Driven Public Health Decision-Making in Resource-Constrained Settings.

Innovative game-based training methods that leverage the ubiquity of cellphones and familiarity with phone-based interfaces have the potential to transform the training of public health practitioners in low-income countries such as Liberia. This article describes the design, development, and testing of a prototype of the Figure It Out mobile game. The prototype game uses a disease outbreak scenario to promote evidence-based decision-making in determining the causative agent and prescribing intervention measures to minimize epidemiological and logistical burdens in resource-limited settings. An initial prototype of the game developed by the US team was playtested and evaluated by focus groups with 20 University of Liberia Masters of Public Health (UL MPH) students. Results demonstrate that the learning objectives—improving search skills for identifying scientific evidence and considering evidence before decision-making during a public health emergency—were considered relevant and important in a setting that has repeatedly and recently experienced severe threats to public health. However, some of the game mechanics that were thought to enhance engagement such as trial-and-error and choose-your-own-path gameplay, were perceived by the target audience as distracting or too time-consuming, particularly in the context of a realistic emergency scenario. Gameplay metrics that mimicked real-world situations around lives lost, money spent, and time constraints during public health outbreaks were identified as relatable and necessary considerations. Our findings reflect cultural differences between the game development team and end users that have emphasized the need for end users to have an integral part of the design team; this formative evaluation has critically informed next steps in the iterative development process. Our multidisciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-national design team will be guided by Liberia-based public health students and faculty, as well as community members who represent our end user population in terms of experience and needs. These stakeholders will make key decisions regarding game objectives and mechanics, to be vetted and implemented by game design experts, epidemiologists, and software developers.

Contribution of the co.LAB Framework to the Collaborative Design of Serious Games: Mixed Methods Validation Study.

BackgroundMultidisciplinary collaboration is essential to the successful development of serious games, albeit difficult to achieve. In a previous study, the co.LAB serious game design framework was created to support collaboration within serious game multidisciplinary design teams. Its use has not yet been validated in a real usage context.ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to perform a first assessment of the impact of the co.LAB framework on collaboration within multidisciplinary teams during serious game design and development.MethodsA mixed methods study was conducted, based on 2 serious game design projects in which the co.LAB framework was used. The first phase was qualitative and carried out using a general inductive approach. To this end, all members of the first serious game project team who used the co.LAB framework were invited to take part in a focus group session (n=6). In a second phase, results inferred from qualitative data were used to define a quantitative instrument (questionnaire) that was designed according to the Checklist for Reporting Results of Internet E-Surveys. Members of both project teams (n=11) were then asked to answer the questionnaire. Quantitative results were reported as median (Q1, Q3), and appropriate nonparametric tests were used to assess between-group differences. Finally, results gathered through the qualitative and quantitative phases were integrated.ResultsIn both phases, the participation rate was 100% (6/6 and 11/11). Verbatim transcripts were classified into 4 high level themes: (1) influence on collaborative dimensions; (2) impact on project course, monitoring, and efficiency; (3) qualitative perceptions of the framework; and (4) influence of team composition on the use of the framework. The web-based questionnaire was then developed according to the 7 dimensions of collaboration by Burkhardt et al. In both projects, the co.LAB framework had a positive impact on most dimensions of collaboration during the multidisciplinary design and development of serious games. When all collaborative dimensions were aggregated, the overall impact of the framework was rated on a scale from –42 to 42 (very negative to very positive). The overall median score was 23 (Q1, Q3: 20, 27), with no significant difference between groups (P=.58). Most respondents also believed that all serious game design teams should include a member possessing significant expertise in serious game design to guide the development process.ConclusionsThe co.LAB framework had a positive impact on collaboration within serious game design and development teams. However, expert guidance seems necessary to maximize development efficiency. Whether such guidance can be provided by means of a collaborative web platform remains to be determined.

Review of The Game Music Handbook

Review of <i>The Game Music Handbook</i>

Application of Data-Oriented Design in Game Development

Game development is a big, human resource intensive industry. Object-Orientated Design (OOD) is the most popular software design paradigm in game development. However, it is not the optimal choice whet it comes to performance and resource utilization. To solve this problem, Data-Oriented Design (DOD) can serve as an alternative for resource-intensive games where performance is the highest priority. The latter approach is often perceived as something exclusive to highly qualified specialists. Thus, a question arises whether DOD can suit and be useful for smaller companies and projects, and what are the trade-offs of using the approach compared to more wide-spread object-orientation.This paper examines the experience of a small game development team implementing two similar case study projects, one using OOD and another using DOD. After an overview of both implementations, the authors analyze and compare the two projects in regards to performance and maintainability. Recommendations are given on when each of the two design approaches should be applied and what are the corresponding skill sets for developers to use them.

Marvinter: A case study of an inclusive transmedia storytelling production

This article examines how the unique characteristics of Marvinter, an inclusive transmedia Advent calendar, affected its production and the individual media workers involved in this. In the native transmedia Marvinter project, a radio series and a mobile game were created and released simultaneously. Using ‘partly shared’ resources, the project was developed by two collaborating, non-profit organisations. Each chapter of the digital game had to match the corresponding radio episode. The whole had to be designed to provide a shared cultural experience that included people with hearing or visual impairments. The authors of the present article were part of the game development team and thus directly experienced the complexity of developing a digital game as part of a transmedia project. This article presents the results of a case study with an insider perspective. It is supplemented by semi-structured interviews with key people in the project. The transmedia nature of Marvinter was justified by the need to include people with complementary disabilities. Although sometimes associated with negative connotations of ‘naked commercialisation’ in transmedia contexts, the marketing strategy was here an important element in promoting inclusivity. However, owing to the concurrent work processes, game production became overly complex.

AR AND VR IN THE GAMING INDUSTRY

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have revolutionized the gaming industry, delivering immersive experiences that transcend traditional gaming boundaries in recent years, AR and VR technologies have gained attention great, changing the way users interact with games. AR overlays digital objects into the real world, while VR is a fully immersive simulated environment. The fusion of this technology has changed gaming, providing players with unparalleled engagement, interactivity, and virtual reality.&#x0D; One of the most important impacts of AR and VR in gaming is to enhance the user experience. AR enables players to integrate digital objects with their physical surroundings, allowing them to blend virtual and virtual interactions. This integration enables a unique gaming experience, creating new dimensions of immersion and interactivity. On the other hand, V.R. This technology allows gamers to engage with their favourite titles in ways previously unimaginable.&#x0D; Additionally, AR and VR have increased the innovation of games in the gaming industry. Developers now have the opportunity to explore new ideas and gaming technologies, and the market has expanded with the introduction of AR-enabled mobile games and high-end VR headsets to leverage these technologies to create a variety of experiences it challenges traditional game values. possibilities on offer.&#x0D; Despite these advances, there are still challenges to the widespread use of AR and VR in gaming. Technical constraints such as hardware requirements and cost may hinder some users. &#x0D; Additionally, creating content that maximize the potential of AR and VR demands specialized skill and resource, posting a barrier for smaller game development team.

Strategies for reward based crowdfunding campaigns in video games: a context of indie game developers in the UK

The objective of the study was to define key success factors and challenges of a crowdfunding campaign for an indie games developer in the UK - We suggest that the key success factors identified can be separated into three categories- campaign factors, product factors, and human factors and propose a model including all three. A good campaign needs careful preparation prior to the launch, effective presentation, appropriate funding model with a realistic funding target for a short period, digital reward structure and well-planned marketing activities. Product characteristics appear to be a playable demo of the game which should be unique yet still having some familiar features. Human factors include having a pre-established audience reach, a relevant background in game development and appropriate team size. A main restraining factor was the stress and time cost of running the campaign, whilst intellectual property issues were found to be less important than expected.

Strategies for reward based crowdfunding campaigns in video games: a context of indie game developers in the UK

The objective of the study was to define key success factors and challenges of a crowdfunding campaign for an indie games developer in the UK – We suggest that the key success factors identified can be separated into three categories- campaign factors, product factors, and human factors and propose a model including all three. A good campaign needs careful preparation prior to the launch, effective presentation, appropriate funding model with a realistic funding target for a short period, digital reward structure and well-planned marketing activities. Product characteristics appear to be a playable demo of the game which should be unique yet still having some familiar features. Human factors include having a pre-established audience reach, a relevant background in game development and appropriate team size. A main restraining factor was the stress and time cost of running the campaign, whilst intellectual property issues were found to be less important than expected.

Exploring Indie Game Development: Team Practices and Social Experiences in A Creativity-Centric Technology Community

The emergence of various interest-based online communities has led to the popularity of new forms of distributed creative teamwork such as citizen science, crowdsourcing, and open source software development. These new phenomena further complicate the context and content of distributed creative teamwork: what are the characteristics of these new forms of creative teams? And how do they shape people’s perceptions and social experiences of distributed creative teams? In this paper, we report our empirical research of the team characteristics and practices in a creativity-centric technology community (i.e., independent [indie] game development) in hopes of exploring these questions. Our findings show that 1) indie game development teams are formed upon shared aspirations and use various strategies to collaborate with friends or online strangers; and their team practices are achieved through a balance between individual creativity and collective vision as well as a collaborative learning for problem solving and self-improvement; and 2) these teams mediate new forms of social interaction and collaborative experiences, featuring a mix of online comradery and weak social ties, and a mix of self-confidence and self-confliction. Using this new dataset and research context, we confirm and extend existing theories of distributed creative teams in CSCW. We also argue that studying these small-scale, self-selected, and interest-based teams can inform the design of collaborative systems to support various creative teams’ social needs.

Learning from the past: A process recommendation system for video game projects using postmortems experiences

Context: The video game industry is a billion dollar industry that faces problems in the way games are developed. One method to address these problems is using developer aid tools, such as Recommendation Systems. These tools assist developers by generating recommendations to help them perform their tasks.Objective: This article describes a systematic approach to recommend development processes for video game projects, using postmortem knowledge extraction and a model of the context of the new project, in which “postmortems” are articles written by video game developers at the end of projects, summarizing the experience of their game development team. This approach aims to provide reflections about development processes used in the game industry as well as guidance to developers to choose the most adequate process according to the contexts they’re in.Method: Our approach is divided in three separate phases: in the first phase, we manually extracted the processes from the postmortems analysis; in the second one, we created a video game context and algorithm rules for recommendation; and finally in the third phase, we evaluated the recommended processes by using quantitative and qualitative metrics, game developers feedback, and a case study by interviewing a video game development team.Contributions: This article brings three main contributions. The first describes a database of developers’ experiences extracted from postmortems in the form of development processes. The second defines the main attributes that a video game project contain, which it uses to define the contexts of the project. The third describes and evaluates a recommendation system for video game projects, which uses the contexts of the projects to identify similar projects and suggest a set of activities in the form of a process.

Ambidextrous Innovation and Game Market Fit Performance: Feedback from Game Testers

ABSTRACTThe dynamics of the market pose a challenge for the digital game industry. Game development firms must develop innovative games to satisfy game players’ ever-changing needs and sustain a suitable product/market fit. To realize such innovation, developers tend to adopt an ambidextrous approach that includes exploratory and exploitative activities to develop games. In addition, game development teams must rely on feedback from game testers to enhance development and meet game players’ needs. However, the effect of feedback on innovation is subject to debate. Some studies have proposed that feedback has potentially negative effects on creativity. Given the prevalence of ambidextrous innovation and the utilization of feedback from game testers, no study to date has investigated the effects of feedback on game development quality. A survey of 119 paired game producers and developers revealed that “feedback timing” from game testers positively enhances the relationship between ambidextrous innovation and a game’s final development performance, whereas “feedback specificity” impairs the effectiveness of ambidextrous innovation. This paper discusses the implications of this study.

Game playbooks: tools to guide multidisciplinary teams in developing videogame-based behavior change interventions.

As mobile technologies and videogaming platforms are becoming increasingly prevalent in the realm of health and healthcare, so are the opportunities to use these resources to conduct behavioral interventions. The creation and empirical testing of game style interventions, however, is challenged by the requisite collaboration of multidisciplinary teams, including researchers and game developers who have different cultures, terminologies, and standards of evidence. Thus, traditional intervention development tools such as logic models and intervention manuals may need to be augmented by creating what we have termed "Game Playbooks" which are intervention guidebooks that are created by, understood by, and acceptable to all members of the multidisciplinary game development team. The purpose of this paper is to describe the importance and content of a Game Playbook created to aide in the development of a videogame intervention designed specifically for health behavior change in young teens as well as the process for creating such a tool. We draw on the experience of our research and game design team to describe the critical components of the Game Playbook and the necessity of creating such a tool.