Justin Gibbs
Production
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Best Practices for Tool Development in Games User Research
The goal of this project was to create and Once the best practices were identified, I
development in the field of Games User that collected positional data during
evaluate a set of best practices for tool
Research (GUR). The following list of best
practices was identified through extensive
research focused on analytics tools for
GUR:
• Tools should be simple and specific
• Heat maps are an effective and
efficient method of communicating
positional and frequency data
• Quantitative data needs qualitative
data for context
• Focus on ease of use and speed of
implementation
• Integrate early and iterate often
• Data collected is targeted towards a
hypothesis
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PRODUCTION
developed a tool plugin for Unreal Engine
playtests, and displayed the data using a
heat map interface.
I chose this project because of the idea of
data-driven game design, which focuses
design on data collected from actual
playtesters. Concrete data aids game
developers in making calculated decisions
to benefit their players. As a producer, I
recognized the benefit that data collection
and analytics would provide to my team,
so I identified a set of best practices and
programmed a tool using best practices
to help my development team.