Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain.<p> Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During <i>preproduction</i>, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort.<p> During <i>production</i>, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates.<p> We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of:<p> <ol> <li>a model for the elements that compose experience requirements,</li> <li>a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and</li> <li>an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements.</li> <ol><p> Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production.

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain.<p> Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During <i>preproduction</i>, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort.<p> During <i>production</i>, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates.<p> We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of:<p> <ol> <li>a model for the elements that compose experience requirements,</li> <li>a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and</li> <li>an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements.</li> <ol><p> Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production.

The use of video games as a sustainable tool for preserving existing archaeological data in an entertaining and interactive manner was investigated. The main aim of such investigation was to explore the potential benefits in terms of archaeological/heritage education, broadcasting, and representing data in a manner that is interactive and encourages critical thinking through play. Game Pass Shelter, located at Kamberg in the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park was used to create a virtual environment in a video game that accurately represents traditional Bushmen rock art and folklore. Two phases were featured in the development of the video game: (i) getting feedback from gamers through a questionnaire I had designed, and (ii) using the identified recommendations to design the 2D video game using Unity Game Engine (a free video game development piece of software). This 2D video game, defined by authenticity to the represented folklore, features rock art motifs from Game Pass Shelter used against the backdrop of the Spoiling of the Eland traditional story. The video game begins with the ‘Rosetta Stone’ of southern African rock art and contextualises it using selected traditional folklore. Through this process, the video game aims to show why hunting was so important to the traditional Bushmen way of life. It further shows why eland were so valued and some unique beliefs that the Bushmen had concerning them. / Dissertation (MA (Archaeology))--university of Pretoria, 2020. / Anthropology and Archaeology / MA (Archaeology) / Unrestricted

No description available.

This research is examining one of the most dominant managerial methods used in development in the video game industry, Agile development. More particularly, the thesis examines a certain attribute of Agile development, that of iteration. The thesis will set to examine how iteration affects several layers of development during the production of a video game and whether it can be replaced by other managerial technics.As a result, the purpose of this thesis is to raise a different viewpoint against the Agile’s iteration. Furthermore, this thesis aims to contribute to the academic research by concentrating on the video game industry, an industry that is often neglected by the academia.The theoretical framework and literature review concentrate on concepts of Agile development, overworking, development cycle in video games, definitions of project success and project failures and creative process in video game development.The thesis deploys qualitative methodology to address and research its data. The collected data belongs to two categories, data stemming from interviews conducted by the thesis’s author and data stemming from journalistic magazines.The results of both type of data are compared and act supplementary to each other, then they are analyzed to answer the research questions asked by this thesis. The results showcase that iteration has negative effects to video game developers in both a macroscale (company’s resources, annual revenue) and in a microscale (overworking, health issues) level. The results also highlight that Agile is an all-time favorite development methodology of developers in the video game industry.In conclusion, the thesis supports the notion that iteration should be suppressed and proposes a number of solutions for that matter. The suggestions are essentially encouragement towards developers: to seek higher interactivity with customers throughout the duration of all the development stages of a video game, to show more trust to established gameplay mechanics and to place more reliance on a franchise’s profit power and benefits. These measures can be used in a preventive manner in order to limit the appearance of iteration and as a result, to limit its’ negative effects.

The video game industry can be ruthless. As a developer, you usually find yourself working in the popular third-party development tools of the time. These tools however might not provide the best usability and quality of life one desires. This can lead to a lot of frustration for the developer, especially when the development enters a crunch period of long and hard work. We believe some of the frustration can be avoided, and we believe this can be done by creating effective, functional and user-friendly integrated development tools specialized for the development environment. In this master's thesis we investigated just that, how integrated game development tools can be designed to be usable in terms of effectiveness and learnability. The investigation was performed by designing and implementing an integrated game development tool. The development of the tool was performed iteratively with user testing between every iteration to find usability defects, allowing the tool to be refined and improved throughout the development process. To finish off the development process, there was a final user test where professional video game developers tried out the tool and then answered a System Usability Scale questionnaire. The System Usability Scale score and task completion rate showed that the final state of the tool can be considered highly usable in terms of effectiveness and averagely usable in terms of learnability. This suggests that involving user testing in the development process is vital for ensuring good usability in the end product.

The game industry is modern and as such in constant evolution, therefore it needs information on how to better its work practices either it be on a professional level or at a training level. This thesis focuses on game education, specifically on the game students partaking in such education and developing a game as part of a game-based development course. The study investigated what kinds of pressure might be afflicting game students at Uppsala University during their game production courses and what are the effects of such pressures on the work/life balance of the concerned game students. To conduct the data collection, a survey with close and open-ended questions was used to gather information on focused topics but also get the opinion of the respondents on the matter. As a result of the research, it was possible to learn that the game students are pushing themselves to adopt overworking tendencies during their game production course. This behavior would be motivated by the different pressures affecting them during their game production course like the pressure to produce high-quality work. The conclusion reached is that the pressures affecting game students during their game production courses are related to the lack of healthy work habits of game students when working independently on their game productions. The pressures have impacts on the work/life balance of the affected students who often end up sacrificing their well-being in favor of work. This decision can have the opposite effect as work/life balance conflicts can hinder a game student's chances of academic success. To address this issue this thesis recommends game schools to support game students who are working independently by leading them to adopt healthy work habits and helping them to cope with the pressures of their environment.

The video game industry has gone through a dramatic change over the last few decades, yetseveral reports show that there are currently many challenges that developers face in their dailywork. A major challenge includes difficulties of getting projects to close within set time andresource restraints. This is something that indicates a connection to the management methodsbeing used, among which Agile management is a popular framework that many turn to. Thisthesis searches for connections between challenges in video game development and the usage ofagile methods like Scrum and Kanban. For this, a qualitative research strategy was used in orderto look into the experiences of video game developers. Five semi-structured interviews with atotal of eleven respondents were conducted. As a complement, a quantitative web-based surveywas made where 23 people participated. The results of this study show that challengespreviously defined within the video game industry, including feature creep, crunch periods anda stressful work pace can also be identified in the industry in southern Sweden to some extent.Underlying patterns indicate the industrial culture as an explanation for an incorrectimplementation of agile methods, which could eventually lead to issues surrounding riskmanagement in projects.

Many software methodologies are being used for the development of video games. However, there are very few studies that cover how these methodologies are deployed and what they affect in the game development process. This study aims to explore the connection between agile development modifications applied in video game studios and their effect on cross-disciplinary communication. The research was conducted in three parts; talks of professional game developers were analysed, a field study in a studio was conducted, and a survey was designed to gain more insights from game developers around the world. After obtaining the results in three parts, a content analysis was carried out to find patterns in agile development that affect communication across disciplines. The found patterns were the overlapping work of developers, the amount of cross-disciplinary meetings, and doing experiments to find a methodology that best fits the development team. This research contributes to the field of game development with a focus on the impact on communication between different disciplines with the usage of agile development.

This study investigated the possibility of procedural generation of skill trees which are similar to skill trees in contemporary video games. A set of randomly-selected skill trees from contemporary video games, from differ- ent game genres, was compiled, and an analysis was performed to extract relevant observations from the set. Using the observations, models for skill tree generation, and for skill tree comparison were proposed, and they were followed for the generation and analysis of the results. It was found that the method of Graph Grammars provided satisfying results compared to the set of skill trees from video games. Additionally, the other methods researched, L-Systems and Naive Randomized Graph Generation, while both may still require improvements discussed in the thesis in order to provide more satis- fying results, they may still be used for particular needs by game designers as they are. 1