The Steps to Create
I woke one day with an idea, create a playful universe accessible to everyone and share knowledge about our digital era (The “I have a Dream” moment). Laughable we might say, ideas are worthless, to create value we need to build, but how to build?
This is where the right process which helps managing complexity is a game changer!
Taking baby steps! Ok, but to where?
With the basic idea which is creating an interactive universe, I thought of a video game, gamification is as very effective Learning Technique. The following question is: How to make it accessible? I looked around me and saw my smartphone, I started to do some research and it was obvious!
2,87 Billion smartphones, I didn’t expect that more than 1/3 of the worldwide population owned a smartphone. So maybe we’re on the right track when it comes to accessibility. Next, who are we going to interact with?
Looking for our Personas
A Persona is an imaginary character representing a target group or segment within the framework of the development of a new product, in our case a mobile game.
For this one, let’s use our “Big Brothers” that gently absorb our data, Google and Facebook for example (The NSA was not available, sorry).
Firstly, how is the “Trend” of mobile games? Hello Google Trend!
By “Tracking” our search, Google has a pretty handy tool called Google trend to see were the “Hype” is thanks to charts, like the bitcoin Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) in 2017 (Go take a look at bitcoin, this time it’s not the same situation even if we’ve reached new All Time Highs; Just to say 👀)
We want to see how the “Interest” in mobile game evolves. Google, gives us some charts!
The Trend is clear, there is twice as much interest in “mobile game” as 15 years ago, and I guess it will increase in the coming years thanks to the cloud gaming like Google Stadia, Xbox Cloud gaming, Playstation Now or the New Amazon Luna. The Whole gaming industry is investing to give mobility to the players thanks to new cellular network technologies such as 5G for example.
Secondly, how do we get some “Insights” about our users? Hello Facebook Audience Insight!
Facebook has a very useful tool to get some socio-professional category called Facebook Audience Insight. By adding some filters such as country, minimum/maximum age, gender and interest, we can get a pretty good idea of our Persona. In our case, for the filters we want everyone who’s interested in mobile gaming, let’s see our results.
The most valuable informations from Facebook Audience Insight in our case is gender and level of education. It gives a first “Insight” on our “Perfect User” from a panel of 150 million users.
With all these informations on our users, we need to ask them a few questions.
- What do you play on Smartphone?
- How do you play?
- Where do you play?
- When do you play ?
- …
Here comes the fun part, we all know some potential users, let’s call some people!
User interviews!
Before picking up the phone, we need to learn some rules to get the best results during our user interviews.
To conduct a Good interview, the right mindset is essential! The interview is there to listen the user and to understand his behavior. During the interview we MUST listen carefully the user, ask open-ended questions, do not judge, do not influence, use silence to let the user speak, always ask “Why” to understand the user’s choice and finally “go with the flow”, don’t stick exactly to the list of questions.
Little tip, It’s better to record the interview (with the user’s agreement!) to be more involved in the discussion, and to be able to rewind the video to see if we missed something! In my case, I use Loom to Record.
let’s create a list of questions for a 30 to 45 minute interview, this list is divided into 5 categories of questions.
The introduction part is were we explain the “Why” of this interview, followed with personal questions to “Identify” our user, this is the first category of questions.
Once we know more about our user, we need to know the possible interaction between the user and the product.
Second Category,“Direct questions”, they are questions that allow us to understand more precisely the direct interaction between the user and our type of product. For example, how often did you play this week?
Next Category, “Relative questions”, they are questions about the interaction with our product and its ecosystem. For example, how do you use your smartphone when you play?
The following part is the most important in my opinion,“Visceral questions”! How do people feel when using our product, if we find a real pain that repeats across several users, we have our “Golden Pass”. It’s this kind of question, what frustrated you during your game session?
The last type of question has a broader perspective, the “Reflexive questions”. With this kind of questions, we want to know how the user interacts with his surrounding about the product. For example, how do you interact with your friend about your games?
In order to Improve our future interviews with users, we conclude with a few questions to find out what they thought about the interview, what went Right/Wrong.
After a few interviews (at least 5 – 6 to get a good perspective), we can group the key findings! For Each Interview, we write a maximum of 5 key Findings.
It’s magic, some key findings appear several times, we have our leads!
Impact map
To make it more challenging and entertaining, we fix a Goal with a Deadline! A Goal helps us Focus on the value-added Tasks.
“ I simply don’t see much point wasting time on small problems when I can solve the Big Ones. Much More return for basically the same effort”
Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Choice
To make things clear, we use an impact map that answers to these 4 questions:
- “Why we do It?” (The Goal)
- “We do it for Whom?” (Persona)
- “How can we help them?” (Needs)
- “What to do exactly?” (Epics, User Stories)
In our case, what could be our Impact map? Let’s see.
“Be in the top 100 Appstore in 8 months with our game for the Y and Z generation who want to fill the void during downtimes with an ergonomic, simple and engaging game.”
Following the key findings, we know that users want a to play in portrait mode to answer to messages (Ergonomic), with no more than 4 actions on the screen (Simple) and be immerse in a universe with collectibles and upgrades without annoying ads every 2 games (Engaging). Notice that user’s are not against ads they “don’t want to feel used”, they like the Win-Win situation were there is an Incentive action like “click on the ad to win 50 coins!”.
With these elements, we decide to create a SubwaySurfer-Like for our version 0.1, and add gradually the learning experience about “Persuasive Technologies” piece by piece in the game while receiving feedbacks from the user playing the released version!
We have a plan, now, time to get to Work.
Let the development Begin!
The easiest way to build our product is to use Unity to create the game mechanics and Blender for the 3D modeling. I’ve never used these tools, I have a programming background but no experience in 3D modeling (just good “Taste” I guess).
I’ve set a Goal: release the first playable version of the game in a maximum of 45 days. I had some little surprises along the way, and I had to make some adjustments keeping in mind the following points, keeping the product quality as high as possible without decreasing it with the choices I’ll have to make. My assumptions was that “I know nothing” (Hello John Snow), but that with work the knowledge will probably stick to my little brain.
“Thinking like a true scientist means being Humbly Arrogant. Humble to have the conviction that you don’t know; arrogant to have the conviction that you can develop the knowledge”
Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Choice
The game’s theme “was” (notice the “was”) VegeDream, a universe of personified vegetables and fruits running to be the best in the garden tournament composed of 2 teams “Fruits Vs Vegetables”.
In almost 25 Days, all the game mechanics were completed. I was programming, learning how to use properly Unity and the shaders correctly (what a mess) and at the same time learning 3D modeling with Blender. Not gonna lie, at first it was “Pain in the Ass”, but useful knowledge at least (look at the 21StStudent Logo)
Here comes the mistake! I though that I had to “create” every element of the product by myself … stupid idea if i want to get a good quality product releases in 45 days.
After 30 days, The 3D models were not as good as I thought and I still had to make the Animations. This is when a quote from a friend came to my mind:
“If you remove this element from your product, does it still have Meaning? Does the quality Decreases?”
Patrick Bobo, Senior Product Manager at JobTeaser
I started to move things around! Bye bye the “self-made” 3D Modeling and Animations, hello great 3D Artists and animation services! That’s when I fell in love with The LowPoly Art of SyntyStudios and the numerous Free animations from Adobe Maximo, Same for the UI, great Job LayerLab. Exit “VegeDream” welcome “Tournament”.
After that, the Workflow was tremendous, the last steps consisted in fine-tuning to publish the product on the App Store, and here it is!
The work is far from over (will it be?). The product only uses a few cognitive biases such as simplification to trigger “The Spark Effect” and the “Middle Stage Effect” in the death menu. Now With the base product we can gradually increment and improve the User Experience (UX), but in our case the development won’t be as fast as in the 45 day challenge. We are creating a free lesson on “Persuasive Technologies”, this stuff takes time.
We are going to make a series of videos explaining Step by Step, What is Captology? Why is it useful in an Ethical way? and how to use it?
Consistency is the key
The Process presented here help us focus on customer needs, reducing the risk of releasing a product that won’t meet User’s requirements. During the development I’ve repeatedly asked for feedback on the possible features to improve the product and my process.
What made this possible? It was the consistency in the work, not the “Talent”, I’m far from being the designers and developers of games like the ones from Nintendo for example.
Why not end this piece with a quote from the Rock, just for fun.
“Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.”
The Rock
