Playniac were at Develop 2011 in Brighton last week and founder Rob Davis talked about the process we use to manage the complex art of designing and producing games for our clients.
In his session “How To Race Squirrels: Designing and Producing Commissioned Games” Rob used several Playniac games productions, including International Racing Squirrels (Channel 4) and Journey to Fossil Island (British Gas) as case studies and demonstrated a variety of methods used to develop and refine game designs.
He illustrated the talk with real-life examples of interactive wireframes, paper testing, character development, user testing, video capture and game balancing.
Apparently Develop’s organisers voted the 30-minute talk as having the quirkiest title of the conference, setting a challenge which of course we will only try to beat next time. Around 200 delegates attended. Slides can be downloaded here (3MB / PDF).
“How To Race Squirrels” slides via SlideShare:
Great presentation! Being a web developer trying to get an idea about the games industry myself, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised about just how much of what was said I was already applying on non-game projects.