Evaluating User Experience in Games: Concepts and Methods - Lirmm

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112 G. McAllister and G.R. White often only scaled up to full size towards the end of the production phase, through Alpha and Beta. 7.3.5 Alpha – Beta – Gold Towards the end of production, the game progresses through a series of statuses which indicate how close development is to completion. In order to achieve Alpha status, all content in the game should be represented, but not necessarily be of final quality. Placeholder content is common, but the game should exist as a coherent whole. From Alpha, a further 6 months would typically be spent advancing through Beta status until the game is finally available for release, with attention turned to bug fixing and finalising the quality throughout. By Beta all content and features should effectively be finished, with all but final polishing still to take place. Nothing further will be added to the game, only tweaking and final adjustments. In particular, this phase is focussed on bug fixing. After Beta, the developer and publisher consider the game to be of a shippable quality and submit a Master candidate disc to the format holder (i.e., Microsoft, Nintendo or Sony) for approval. Each game that is released on any of their consoles has first to be approved by the format holder’s own QA team. Strict technical and presentation standards define how all games on the platform should deal with issues of brand recognition as well as certain HCI guidelines. For example, which controller buttons to use for navigating dialogue boxes, the format and content of messages to display to the player while saving games, or where to position important interface elements on the television screen. The approval process usually takes 2 weeks, but in the event that the submission candidate fails, a further submission will have to be made once the development team have resolved all of the faults. How long this takes depends on the severity of the issues, but once the team have successfully dealt with them, another 5–10 days will be required for the re-submission approval process. Conceivably, further submissions could be required until all issues have been resolved. Once approval has been given, the publisher uses the Gold Master disc to begin manufacturing and distribution, which takes between 1 and 4 weeks. Typically, a unified release date is agreed upon with all retail outlets, which requires an additional week to ensure stock is delivered from the distributors to all stores in time for simultaneous release. In the United Kingdom, this results in retail outlets releasing games on a Friday. 7.4 Case Studies This section presents three case studies from world’s leading developers Black Rock Studio (part of Disney Interactive), Zoë Mode and Relentless Software. Each studio will discuss their development process, time scales and how they involve end users.
7 Video Game Development and User Experience 113 7.4.1 Case Study 1 – Black Rock Studio Black Rock Studio specialise in developing racing games for Xbox, PlayStation (PS) and PC. Their latest game, Pure, was released in September 2008 to critical acclaim. We interviewed Jason Avent, the Game Director of Pure, who attributes the high ratings to not only the talent of his team, but also the usability evaluations that were conducted during development. 7.4.1.1 Game Development at Black Rock Studio Game development at Black Rock Studio typically takes between 18 and 24 months, with a phase breakdown as follows: – Prototyping (3–6 months) – Pre-production (6 months+) – Production (6–12 months) – Alpha, Beta, submission and release (4–9 months) – Testing by the format owner (10 days) – Disc manufacture (2–4 weeks) The total development time for Pure was approximately 20 months, which was at the lower end of the range of each phase. Delivering the product while keeping to the lower end of the range was attributed to the team’s experience and their agile development process. Each of these phases will now be explained in more detail. 7.4.1.2 Prototyping During the prototyping phase, the publisher’s marketing team employed a recruitment agency, which produced a detailed online questionnaire about the game concept and distributed it to approximately 100 people within the target demographic. Following the online survey, a focus group study was conducted with three groups of 4–5 participants to discuss the game concept. The study was run in a lounge environment, with two members of staff, one taking notes from behind a one-way mirror and the other sitting with the participants to facilitate the discussion. The team also decided to build a “Pre-Vis” (pre-visualisation) prototype for one of Pure’s key features, player-customised vehicles. This took the form of a noninteractive movie showing each part of the bike attaching to a central frame. This was not a technical demo, but rather just a visual benchmark or reference from which the interface for this part of the game could later be developed. 7.4.1.3 Pre-production Pure had originally been intended to just be an incremental advance on the previous title in the series, but over the course of 7 months the game concept evolved through several different designs. The initial idea was to make the most authentic quad bike racing game on the market, but this was abandoned in favour of a concept
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Human-Computer Interaction Series E
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Regina Bernhaupt Editor Evaluating
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For Philippe
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viii Foreword Chapter 3, Presence I
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x Foreword personality which evolve
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Contents Part I Introduction to Eva
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Contributors Regina Bernhaupt IRIT,
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Contributors xvii Manfred Tscheligi
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xx About the Authors Emily Brown is
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xxiv About the Authors Christina Ko
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xxvi About the Authors MIT Media La
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xxviii About the Authors Theft Auto
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Chapter 1 User Experience Evaluatio
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1 User Experience Evaluation in Ent
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Chapter 2 Enabling Social Play: A F
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Chapter 3 Presence, Involvement, an
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Index A Advanced interaction games,
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