catronauts
Project Management, Producing, User Experience Design, Game Design, Monetization Strategy, Market Research, User Research, Ethnographic Research, Experience Mapping, User Flows, Personas, Prototyping, User Testing
PROJECT CONTRIBUTIONS
THE SOLUTION
Our team of seven worked in 7 two week sprints, using a combination of agile and waterfall project management to continually iterate, build and test prototypes.
CONTEXT
Catronauts began as a multiplayer competitive game that was designed as part of a design jam held in the first weekend of the Master of Digital Media program at the Centre of Digital Media in September 2016. Our team consisted of three artists, two programmers, a lead game designer, and myself as the project manager and lead UX designer. The goal of the jam was to create a digital experience for a children’s space museum. In the two weeks after the jam, the catronaut characters were introduced in this later stage.
When given the opportunity to continue the project or move on, the team decided to stay together and build upon it with another 13 weeks. Acting as our client was Jason Elliott, a member of the faculty who played the role of a venture capitalist who wished to see the game become commercially viable.
THE PROBLEM
How might we create a fun, multi-player collaborative game that could appeal to kids aged 8 and up, as well as to a broad audience? What monetization system would work best for this game?
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4 mid-fidelity levels of a vertical slice of Catronauts, with 4 player capability, including 4 collaborative super powers, 2 power up types, 3 enemy types.
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A monetization system and plan for future development
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Documentation including a game design document, art bible, and tech bible
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Selected for the SIGGRAPH 2017 Education Exhibit
THE RESULTS
THE PROCESS
The Project Management Process
Through the initialization and discovery phase of the project, we began by working with our client and the school to define our final deliverables, which included the digital files of the build of the game, a presentation, and documentation.
Through the first three weeks of the project, I led the team in creating the following:
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The mission, vision, agile, and scope statements for our project
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An agreement of the roles and responsibilities, along with who would be a decider in specific areas
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Conflict resolution protocols with dot voting
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Risk assessment and a mitigation plan
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Assumptions and justifications
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A work breakdown structure to detail each deliverable
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A project map and Gantt chart with sprint goals determined by the project milestones and dependencies
While we used some waterfall tools to set up the project and create our project charter, our day to day and development process was agile, with daily scrums, continual iterations and testing procedures. Waterfall was necessary to identify the dependencies and risks, while agile allowed us to rapidly develop and test our prototypes.
Research Phase
We began with market research, looking at other multiplayer games, both on mobile and PC, to identify the trends, key features, pain points, and monetization strategies among both the best selling multi-player games like DOTA, as well as multiplayer cooperative games like Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.
We found that despite a rising trend of new entrants in social gaming, less than 8% of the games on steam are multiplayer. Within the massively competitive gaming industry, local multiplayer games are an area of great potential for indie developers.
The user experience design process began by developing 4 personas and user stories:
We verified these personas and stories through interviews and surveys, and developed scenarios of use that would help us better understand the persona’s entry point and motivation for beginning to play Catronauts.
Design and Production Phase
During our ideation and research phase, we became more intrigued by games that brought people together for couch collaboration, and we decided that we wanted to make this the core of the game.
We began by experimenting with a turn-based paper prototype allowed us to test the mechanics for cooperative play, shooting and shared control of a mothership. User testing of this paper prototype validated these ideas with our client, and allowed us to proceed in production. Once we had the core developed, each sprint presented the opportunity to further design the world of the game and refine the rules, mechanics, and controls.
We structured our production into 4 two-week sprint cycles. During these sprints, we digitized the game and gradually introduced enemies, obstacles, abilities and UI elements. At each stage we sought to emphasize design choices that encouraged cooperation, and we regularly conducted user testing to measure our progress in achieving this goal.
Given the diverse age range and level of gaming experience between our personas, and the fact that we wanted our game to be able to cross generational divides to bring people together, usability was a major concern. We focused our testing on three areas:
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An intuitive control scheme
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Balancing mechanics for cooperative and individual gameplay
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A progressive tutorial system and gradual difficulty in the level design
While we conducted user tests within our school and faculty regularly, we were able to stage an ethnographic test in the home of a friend whose family fit our personas. Kathy is a 41 year-old director with three children, aged 12, 8, and 6. All three played along with Kathy for an evening while we observed.
This test not only verified that the game was fun and collaborative for kids, but that it would be the kind of game parents would buy to entertain their children. While we assumed that the game may be too challenging for children under 10 years old, all three of the children, including the 6 year-old, easily mastered the level within 20 minutes, and requested more challenging levels.
Monetization
Interviewing both parents afterwards led us to return to the topic of monetization. While we had developed Kathy had suggested that she was inclined to get free-to-play games for the kids, and would only buy games that were educational or if the kids could play together. This insight informed a survey of parents, that found that aside from retail purchases, downloadable content (DLC) was the most popular pricing structure.
We settled on a chapter-based episodic structure for Catronauts. The first chapter would be free to play, with subsequent chapters available for purchase on steam or console stores. The game will also feature a skill tree system for abilities that could be unlocked either through the accumulation of experience points or the purchase of downloadable content.
Story and Future Development
With the structure determined to be episodic, we developed a back narrative and story structure for the arch of Catronauts, to serve as a guide for the concept art and for future development.
