Benefits and struggles of Lean Game Development

Bachelor in Game Design by Anhembi Morumbi3d Animator by Gnomon School of Visual Effects and Melies SchoolStarted as Game Master for MMOsGame Designer on the late Takô Online

GameFounders 4th class alumni!

HEEEY!

Developing Project Tilt: “Quake meets Mario Kart in 2D” Coming soon to Steam

Once upon a time...

Started inside a bigger studio in 2012 Critical Studio gave us mentorship and office space

Unexpected journey

HOW WEWORK

Lean Startup Methodology

Lean was introduced to us by Critical Studio since the beggning it was priority in our process

This means everything we do is thought out as a test and released to the end-user as soon as possible

How does it work?

Build > Measure > Learn- Build MVPs to prove or disprove hypothesis

- Validate your hypothesis with data from experiments

Build

- Game has been open to the public since the first month

- Built in MVP blocks

- Weekly tests with the players from our tester group

Each new feature is still released as an MVP Exemples: Missions, Friends, XP, Store

Measure and Learn

We use this data to iterate on features and make them better according to the players’ needs

GameAnalytics & database for quantitative data

Facebook posts and player feedback e-mails to collect qualitative data

A metodologia do Lean nos foi apresentada pela Critical Studio

Our processlive game on the web

define identify problems, prioritize them and

create a hypothesis to work on

analyse feedback

players’ comments on emails, facebook, etc

develop build something and

test internally

get it out to the community

marketing, customer service, community

management

PROS CONS

Gather lots of user feedbackGet to know our audienceAnswers: risk mitigationLive and “living” gameCommunity <3Revenue possibilitiesEnough users for multiplayer

Marketing/social media puts a lot of weight on the art teamCommunity managementServer costs (online game)Hard to plan on the long term

As any process, it might not be perfect and has pretty clear pros and cons

Knowing our audience is our greatest asset And having a validated product makes us more confident

“No business plan survives first contact with a customer.”- Steve Blank

Knowing your user and validating your ideas makes “risks” smaller.

You learn what works on your product, what doesn’t, and what you should work on first.

We lose a lot of time with activities that are not development but that are part of having a product

But, that being said,

IT’S NOT EASY

Some important features are delayed for not being a priority We deal with too many things at once for a small teamConstant bugfixes

We got success in various ways and are working to make it a financial success too

In the end, IS IT WORTH IT?

850k accounts created100k MAUactive community on facebook and discussion groups6500+ feedback e-mails

GameFoundersTrip to China via SkymobiLocal industry recognition

In the end, what makes it worth it is the players’ engagement and seeing that the game is important to them

eduardo@bitcakestudio.comwww.bitcakestudio.com

SHUPER TEAM!!