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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Three Statistical Tests Every Game Developer Should Know
Speaker(s): Elan Ruskin
Company Name(s): Insomniac Games
Track / Format: Programming

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Overview: "How much does this optimization really speed up my game?" can be a difficult question to answer when you're measuring differences of microseconds in highly variable framerates. "When I changed the minimap, 15% fewer playtesters got lost" might have been a fluke - or not - depending on how many testers you tried. Fortunately, statistical techniques exist to turn noisy, real-world sources of data like these into confident answers.
This talk is a succint how-to on statistics for answering questions like "does this new camera control scheme make players happier?", "how many players do I need to test this design change on to prove whether it works better?" and "does the framerate really get faster when I do this thing or is it just a fluke of measurement?" We skip past the mathematical background and cut directly to the practical how-to you can use in Excel today.

GDC 2016

Elan Ruskin

Insomniac Games

free content

Programming

Programming