Designing for an Ecosystem
When designing Escape velocity, I had to think about engagement in ways that I haven't had to before. This is because instead of being a standalone product where you are purchasing that and that is the whole experience, is instead part of a larger ecosystem in which you would play not just this, but other games as part of the Obsidian Bay. Obsidian Bay is a product by Strike Arena in which players reserve this bay where they have prop guns that have things like recoil and laser sights and you play games on a large 20-foot projected screen. Each game is short and can be swapped quickly. So, each game is not a standalone engagement experience, but rather part of a larger cohesive whole, and so I had to take that into account while working on Escape Velocity.
The biggest difference when designing in this kind of environment is that players might, especially at the start, be swapping between games a lot. You want to really hook players in and explain your game very quickly, so that way they can either decide whether this is one of their games that they want to have in a kind of rotation and play during this session, or if it's not necessarily for them and want to play some other games. Since all these various games are part of the same ecosystem, it means that they aren't competing, but rather each game is supporting the other games around it. This means that playtesting had to be done quite a bit differently rather than just playtesting our game that we're working on. In addition to more traditional playtests I had people come in and play test Obsidian Bay as a whole and made sure that our game meaningfully added to and fit within the larger ecosystem.
Very early on in this internship I sat down with the other designers, producers, and our executive producer to discuss playtesting and how each team can support the other teams. At the very start of this, a lot of the conversation was how to help playtest each teams’ specific games, as well as playtest some other things that weren't within the scope of our internship. I brought up the idea that we do need to playtest Obsidian Bay and how our games fit within it because while playtesting just your game is very useful for finding bugs and specific feedback on your game. By putting each project in isolation, you are missing a large portion of the overall experience. When I mentioned this, everyone kind of had that click in their mind and we were able to get more in line of how we need to design and playtest our games to create the best possible experience.