Tag: Adelaide Games Studio

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Development Processess Industry

Ensuring Our Clients Get What They Need!

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!

contact@minimammothgames.com

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Events Industry Prototypes

Exhibiting At THE Museum of Discovery

Roving Rovers at the Museum of Discovery

As many of you have heard, here at Mini Mammoth Games we have a Hard Sci-fi lunar management sim under development, Roving Rovers! In December of 2022 we introduced ourselves to Lisa Bailey from the University of South Australia who runs the MOD. Which opened up a great opportunity we had been looking for, a month long exhibition for the public. This would not only open Roving Rovers up to being played by many different people, but also allow us to get first hand feedback and analytics to help guide on-going development.

With an exciting month-long exhibition ahead of us we thought it was only fitting to host a Launch Party. We could then celebrate the wider games industry,as well as connect with space industry professionals from across the state. With the help of the MOD staff we were able to pull off a great night, with an excellent spread of food and drink choices in the very comfortable and welcoming Gould Gallery.

The night went off without a hitch, everyone was able to find the Gallery and we filled most of the main hall., With our game accessible in an adjacent room, everyone was able to mingle and see what the fuss was all about. We were also blessed to have some great speakers that talked about the idea and conception of Roving Rovers. Thank you to Cameron Mackness from Flinders University, Andreas Antoniades from Saber Astronautics and John Culton from the Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources (ATCSR). Their endless support of Mini Mammoth Games and Roving Rovers has been a big help with the project and its development so far.

At the exhibition we decided to show off multiple versions of Roving Rovers, showing how the game has evolved over its development . Starting in late 2021 alongside Flinders University and some of their students, we were able to create a small but enjoyable demo that did an ok job at showcasing the 2022 Australian Rover Challenge. With such a welcoming and encouraging response to the demo we decided to continue to develop Roving Rovers further and so we prepared an update for the Space Forum event later that year. In 2023 we once again worked with (ATCSR) to create a more accurate rover demo while adding in some of the participating team’s rovers used in the physical challenge.

All of these versions of the game were available to play with at our exhibition, as well as a few posters providing context as to why there were multiple versions of the same game and explaining the history of the project. We were also allowed to have Mini Mammoth Games staff members manning the exhibition and working from the space, allowing those who visited to ask more in depth questions and learn more about it’s on-going development.

Alongside multiple builds of Roving Rovers we were tracking analytics from the most recent build. These were also displayed  to those who visited the exhibit. We used this event as a way to see how players engage and interact with the rover builder to complete various terrain challenges. With the exhibition open to the public for 20 days we had a staggering 649 sessions, over 61 hours of total playtime with an average of 5 minutes and 45 seconds per player. We did have someone play for a total time of 53 minutes, more than 10 times longer than the average. Players who did play for an extended amount of time enjoyed the rover builder the most and would spend a large portion of their time fiddling with the designs.

 

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Having developers present allowed us to also observe how players would interact with the game between the various builds. From our observations players really enjoyed the rover builder, but wished to have more firm directions/quests like the 2 Australian Rover Challenge builds had.

Our experience with the MOD was fantastic and with over 600 distinct sessions of Roving Rovers it was effective at reaching a large audience. Furthermore, with the MOD allowing developers to work there during its opening hours we were also able to interact and watch those who played the game, which expedited our feedback process.

We would like to thank the MOD. for inviting us to use their space, and all the help and support they provided over the month we were set up there. It was an invaluable experience and we would highly recommend it to any developers given the opportunity.

Thank you to everyone who helped us get to this point and we appreciate all the support!

Click on the buttons bellow to keep up to date and to learn more about Roving Rovers!

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Categories
Industry

Growing The Industry

Growing the Adelaide Games Scene

Hello everyone!

We think it is incredible when companies help to grow and support the growth, development and evolution of their industry. Here at Mini Mammoth Games we are trying to do exactly that despite still being a SME. We are actively supporting new devs, the growth and outreach of games and how they can be used as more than just entertainment every day we operate.

Before Mini Mammoth Games, our founders were all studying together and being offered occasional placements through our academy. While helpful, they were rarely doing explicit game development work and often the projects were in semi-adjacent fields instead. Although ultimately a bit disappointing, these placements did show us how variable our skills can be but just weren’t what many of us were wanting; a placement where we could build a game, from start to finish. Conception to distribution.

Unfortunately there weren’t any game specific placements available in the state, and from the founding of Mini Mammoth Games we set out to change that. Starting off with our old haunt, the Academy of Interactive Entertainment. It was a slow start, but eventually we had a revolving door of placement teams coming in and out and creating hyper casual mobile games in a pipeline that took them from the design and concept to marketing and release onto the Google Play Store.

With this in place we wanted to offer that chance to the full contingent of educational institutes in the state, but first we needed a small increase in our office size to accommodate the increasing demand. Flinders University and Adelaide University were eager to jump onto the opportunity to be able to find placements for their games students. With having work experience directly related to the industry it also gives students a leg up after graduating as they are able to ask staff here to be a reference for their resumes. We can then provide accurate feedback as to how they work in a studio environment and help to push them into the industry.

Aside from our work to help the learning and integration of new developers into this industry,  one of our goals as a company is to  grow the local industry. Our mission is to create memorable experiences that promote a positive impact in the world, and we are achieving that through our placement program, and within all aspects of Mini Mammoth Games. With our client and internal projects we aim to scale internally, so we hire on staff from our program. With the extra experience, they can then at minimum get a casual job working in the game industry. Best case scenario they get a permanent full or part-time job here with us. This is another area where we can further help our previous placements, providing them experience and portfolio work they can use to advance their career even if we aren’t positioned to support them long term at the time.

To extrapolate a little further, within our outreach and client work we are continuously talking to industries and companies whose involvement and use of games as an interactive medium has been minimal at best. Our aim with a majority of networking and outreach is to help those outside of the games industry see how an interactive experience can help them connect with their audiences in a more personal, educational and entertaining way. Something small and personal can often make a massive difference in the way they talk with their own customers, and in the big picture we can help a lot of people learn new, interesting things about the world.

This is only a quick look into what we do and try to achieve here at Mini Mammoth Games, but we hope that this not only inspires other developers to help upskill and support new developers, but also other companies. We can’t do everything ourselves and growing the industry here in Adelaide will benefit everyone in the long run.

So if you, or anyone you know is interested in participating in our program, or running your own, please reach out to contact@minimammothgames.com. We will be sure to get back to you as soon as we can!

Categories
Events

Avcon 2023

Avcon 2023

In a good stroke of luck our application to avcon was accepted and we decided to showcase Roving Rovers. This was an exciting start to the now continuous conventions that will crowd the rest of our calendar. Although we had only a week’s notice we had already had our fair share of conventions so we were prepared to take on the task of getting everything ready.

Preparation

Now to prepare for the convention Mini Mammoth focuses on 3 main aspects, these being: the game itself, marketing collateral and a little bit of merch to spice things up.

Now thankfully we had already built a player ready demo thanks to the Space Forum last year, but we still had the other 2 to take care of.

 

  1. For the marketing collateral we had 2 assets to create and order; a 2m tall pull-up banner and a smaller table top banner. Both showing off Roving Rovers but the smaller held a QR code to easily allow visitors to sign up to our mailing list.
  2. In regards to the merch we brought along a myriad of collectables; badges, stickers and some cards. The first 2 served the same purpose, to help spread awareness of Mini Mammoth Games and Roving Rovers. This meant that we had to create multiple designs for each, which we will show you below:

Will just like to shamelessly promote the fact that we made the badges ourselves, from design to actually hand pressing them together with a manual machine. This took a lot of time, but saved us a ton of money, though that was only because we knew someone with the manual machine beforehand.

 

The cards we designed to help visitors with easy access to everything Roving Rovers, this means the game, our socials, any community forums and so on and so forth.

Exhibiting!

With Avcon being at the convention centre it meant that there was plenty of (paid) parking around and underneath which meant that we didn’t have to haul everything from a distance. Though we will suggest making sure you have a trolley if you are bringing more than one trip’s worth of things. We had 2 trips to get everything inside however that was with us holding on to more than what we should have been comfortable holding. Including this it still only took me and 1 other approximately an hour to set everything up and have a short tour of the rest of the venue to see what other stalls were looking like.

Both Saturday and Sunday were an excellent experience for our staff and placements alike, we had offered them the opportunity to allow them to gain more experience within the industry that would otherwise be unknown without becoming an indie developer.

“Avcon was a fantastic experience for us to get Roving Rovers out there and get real feedback from players. It was great seeing all the talented cosplayers, artists and other game developers from South Australia.” – Tyler (Programming Director)

Thank you to everyone who attended Avcon and especially those who came to the indie games room as this is one of the few conventions that help to lift up the indie developers within South Australia. Furthermore this was a great way to show off Roving Rovers to the wider Australian community as this was a project that had mostly stayed within the space industry till now.

Conclusion

While we are lucky to be able to attend Avcon at such short notice, it still was a last minute push to get everything ready on time. Thankfully we had a small break before client work was set to start the week after, this being the main reason we were able to successfully prepare.

If you aren’t interested or unable to exhibit at Avcon we would still highly recommend attending as a visitor, however this was a great way to experience exhibiting a game for the first time.

Overall Avcon is a great convention to attend and helps to support a wide range of small and independent businesses from South Australia. We had a great time and apart from the last minute rush it was a rather chill time to prepare for and attend. If you are an indie developer looking to attend here are our tips for attending conventions:

 

  1. If you plan to showcase a demo at conventions make sure to add marketing collateral or merch assets into your pipeline; so that they aren’t done last minute.
  2. If any of these items are to be printed by a third party make sure to leave at minimum a week for printing and delivery.
    1. Officeworks is our recommendation for pull-up banners
  3. Make sure to leave QA time for your demo so that visitors to your table don’t spend their time finding every bug.
    1. Have your demo accessible to the public so they can play it even if they miss out at the convention, this should be something that you advertise while you’re there!
  4. Make sure to have a set plan; this will help to remove a lot of stress and allow you to enjoy the experience more.

 

Thank you to everyone who attended and we look forward to seeing everyone’s faces in the future, whether at next year’s Avcon or other conventions that help to celebrate Australia’s talents!

If you would like to check out Roving Rovers follow this link:

Steam

And if you would like to stay up to date with its development sign up to our mailing list:

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