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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Fast Fail Your Systems with Modeling
Speaker(s): Laralyn McWilliams, Rick Ernst
Company Name(s): The Workshop Entertainment, The Workshop Entertainment
Track / Format: Design

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Overview: How a system sounds on paper is very different from how it feels to experience it as a player, which is in turn very different from how it performs over time against a large, live audience. Discovering what works and what doesn't before you launch the game is invaluable. Modeling your systems is one way to get a sense of how they will perform once they're live. This talk goes through both basic and new ways to model pacing, cadence and mechanics. We'll show examples of modeling action game mechanics via a board game and a complete model of reward/monetization cadence via a Unity simulator. Using tools like these, we can not only better understand the player's experience, but also help foster a key shift in metrics and tools to focus both on what makes money AND what makes a positive, fun play experience.

GDC Next 2014

Laralyn McWilliams

The Workshop Entertainment

Rick Ernst

The Workshop Entertainment

free content

Design

Design