The first session of Core Labs Games Accelerator was an introduction. I was nerveus as hell just to tell the others who I am and where I stand. The second session we have Hans Ten Cate of maxplay.io joining us to give a talk on *Production Timelines*. He used to work in EA's publishing group before leaving for MaxPlay, so his background is awesome. |
The session
I didn't learn anything about the development timeline during my education. 4 In a Blow is only my 3th video game project that I'm working on. So I learned a lot from this session.
The organization of 4 In a Blow is quite chaotic but it's ok because it's mostly the programmer and me working on the game.
Another interesting thing is the hypothetical dev timeline.
The time spend in a particular phase of the development can also be a part of your business strategy.
Preview Labs for example is a company that specializes in fast prototyping which is good for the prototype and pre production phase. Publishers are mostly focused on phase 5. And so on...
With G-Aim we'll be focussing on the concept, prototype and pre production phases. Knowing the market and your target customers is essential if we only want to make our own commercial games. We can recoup this extra cost by choosing the best developer for the our projects (and not just by innovation of the concept phase).
Hans also talked about roadmaps and schedules but those are quite useless for our project because the developer works on 4 In a Blow between other projects.
The organization of 4 In a Blow is quite chaotic but it's ok because it's mostly the programmer and me working on the game.
Another interesting thing is the hypothetical dev timeline.
The time spend in a particular phase of the development can also be a part of your business strategy.
Preview Labs for example is a company that specializes in fast prototyping which is good for the prototype and pre production phase. Publishers are mostly focused on phase 5. And so on...
With G-Aim we'll be focussing on the concept, prototype and pre production phases. Knowing the market and your target customers is essential if we only want to make our own commercial games. We can recoup this extra cost by choosing the best developer for the our projects (and not just by innovation of the concept phase).
Hans also talked about roadmaps and schedules but those are quite useless for our project because the developer works on 4 In a Blow between other projects.
For past weeks I made contact Nick Yee of Quantic Foundry.
Their player motivation model is very usefull for understanding the players.
After some disussion with Nick we concluded that the player motivation model did not fit in my game analysing model that is based on the lenses of game design. Nick also confirmed that Quantic Foundry could not provide data for my custom market research.
Vgmarket, Burke and iMinds could help me to gather the data I need for my analysing model.
Nick also noted "We might consider a project that was about creating/validating a new assessment tool, but the project scope/cost of that would be quite large (in the tens of thousands)."
So I got two choices for our next project:
Hm... maybe I'm dreaming to much but it doesn't hurt trying it.
To be continued.
Their player motivation model is very usefull for understanding the players.
After some disussion with Nick we concluded that the player motivation model did not fit in my game analysing model that is based on the lenses of game design. Nick also confirmed that Quantic Foundry could not provide data for my custom market research.
Vgmarket, Burke and iMinds could help me to gather the data I need for my analysing model.
Nick also noted "We might consider a project that was about creating/validating a new assessment tool, but the project scope/cost of that would be quite large (in the tens of thousands)."
So I got two choices for our next project:
- Go for a assesment tool that gathers lots of data, can be reused but will cost a significant amount of money to make.
- Go for a survey that can't be reused, collects restricted amount of data and can easely cost 4000$.
Hm... maybe I'm dreaming to much but it doesn't hurt trying it.
To be continued.