Ensuring Our Clients Get What They Need!
Over here at Mini Mammoth Games we create games and inspiring interactive experiences! Throughout this we will take you through our process of helping clients and potentially you to Discover, Develop and further engage with their target audience.
We have a simple 4 step process to ensure that you can be comfortable and confident that the product and tool you receive will be a) what you need, b) an experience that follows the values and vision of you and your company and c) something that you can be proud of helping to create; afterall we are here to help you entertain, educate and engage.
Discovery
Our Discovery process allows us to work with you to determine what interactive experience will benefit them and their goals the most. In order to achieve this we consult with you and help to make decisions fitting your goals and outcomes for the project. For example:
Is it to interact and build a stronger connection with your current customers?
Or to attract and gain new loyal and trusting customers?
Throughout this process we create 4 detailed and in depth documents talking about the method to build your product, as well as how and who it will engage with.
3 of the following documents are for the design, technical and aesthetic construction of your product, they are there so you can envision what the final product will look like. The 4th is an overview of the 3, with some more baseline managerial content to allow your decision makers to easily process and decide the best path forward.
Product specific documents:
Game Design Document
- Considered to be the ‘guiding vision’ of the project
- Explain how the experience will play out, how the product feels to play (for example: smooth, clunky, floaty) and how users will interact with the project
- This is the “method”, the instructions that tell you the process of creating the product
- Taking accessibility into account can change the design of a project significantly and is important to cover within the pre-production documents
- Accessibility covers a wide range of things from a different colour scheme for colour blind people to giving the option to rearrange the control mapping for keyboards or controllers
- Outline any risks surrounding the project
- Common risks for any project
- Game specific due to your circumstances and needs
- This will cover the development timeline
- Will go into depth about the length of development milestones
- When major mechanics will be completed
- When the first pass of the artstyle is completed, so that you and the development team can start to see how the game will look once its complete
Technical Design Document
- Related to the backend, it goes over the technicalities that create the backbone of your product
- This document will also cover in depth the security of the project
- Whether your product is intended to be used online or offline, it is important to ensure that it cannot be easily modified or hacked, especially if you are recording any data; personal or not
- Optimisation of the project is important to ensure that users have a pleasant experience
- This ensures that the project runs at an optimal frame rate, loading times are short and that users are not frustrated when interacting with the product
Art Bible
- Determines what the aesthetic off the project will be
- Helps with ensuring that it will visually appeal to the target audience
- Ensures continuity and consistency in the art style
- Informs artists working on the project about requirements and restrictions
- Ensures that the artwork is high quality without reducing the optimisation
- Ensures that the project is ‘user friendly’ and understandable to those who aren’t familiar with similar software
- Makes sure that the Designers and Programmers understand the graphics requirements and how to integrate the art into the project
The 4th is called the Production Plan and will detail the costs, budgets, development timelines, as well as funding options and opportunities available.
These documents provide clients with a full and comprehensive plan that allow decision makers to pick the best path forward.
Development
In the previous phase we worked with the client to ensure that, on paper, the experience will meet all their goals and achieve the effect they were looking for. This phase focuses on putting those plans into action. We create their project whole cloth using our patented processes and supporting services. Throughout the development we keep the client up to date through the use of milestones and fortnightly meetings. This is our ‘Quality Quickly’ process, which focuses on rapid prototyping, iteration and target market feedback.
The milestones are:
Minimum viable product
- Basic art is present with a simple version of all mechanics
Mechanically complete alpha
- Still basic art, main art assets are completed and the full and complete version of mechanics are present.
Content complete beta
- All mechanics and first pass of all assets, able to envision the whole experience from just this version
Quality assurance
- Improve and remove bugs, get all final versions of art assets
- Refine and perfect game feel
Polish
- Ensuring the game is at its best state before the client receives it
This enables both us and the client to ensure that what we build and create for them continues to meet their needs.
Publication
Within the discovery phase we work to figure out which platforms the clients want to use and the best tools to reach their intended target audience. Once the game is built we release it to those platforms and continue to monitor it, double checking that once downloaded it still works as intended.
We also ensure that the game’s presentation on each platform through marketing is at its best to entice the available audience to interact and play the game.
Support
Once we have helped our clients to design, create and publish the product, we get to the last phase of our services.
On-going support!
We offer this to clients to ensure that the game is well adjusted to issues and bugs that appear through intense use or unexpected platform changes. This is often due to the user base being noticeably larger than our testing base, allowing us to discover bugs and issues we never could have found in our QA phase. This will continue for 6 months after the game has been published to ensure that all bugs, issues and mistakes have been corrected, allowing our clients to gain as much benefit as possible from the product.
But to summarise, on-going support allows us to:
- Bug fix
- Amend product breaking corner cases
- Meet the ever changing needs of the launch/distribution platform
- Continue to improve customer engagement
This ensures a smooth release, distribution and user experience for our clients and their audience.
Our 4 step process ensures that clients are in control and involved for the whole creation process of the product that we develop for them. Allowing them to adjust and keep up to date with any change in trends and necessities from their end and ours.
If you would like to learn more about our process and the benefits of an interactive engagement product, contact us at the following email and organise a meeting with one our wonderful designers!