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Visual Game Tuning

Explore the innovative approach of Visual Game Tuning (VGT), which integrates interactive visualizations into game development. As games become increasingly complex and costly to develop, VGT offers transformative solutions that simplify debugging, improve testing, and reduce development expenses. Using real-time feedback and quantitative analysis, developers can assess player experiences, ensuring optimal game "feel." This presentation delves into the methodologies and future prospects of VGT, highlighting its potential to reshape the gaming industry by making the development process more efficient and insightful.

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Visual Game Tuning

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  1. Visual Game Tuning Integrating Interactive Visualizations into Game Development

  2. Why InfoVis & Gaming? • Games are increasingly: • Complex • Hard to debug • Hard to test • Expensive to develop

  3. Why InfoVis & Gaming? • Information Visualization can: • Help reduce complexity • Give insight into processes • Assist the debugging process • Reduce cost

  4. Think of a game as a multidimensional dataset

  5. Drift! – the racing game

  6. Drift! – the racing game • 1992 Mazda RX-7 • 236bhp, 156mph top speed, 0-50mph in 4.4s • How much does this matter in a video game? • It depends on the game! • What does matter? • The “feel”

  7. Drift! – the racing game • How do we define “feel” ? • Perceived: Rigidity, Acceleration, Speed, etc… • Reality means less here • How do we find the “correct” feel? • QA Cycles

  8. Traditional QA Cycle

  9. Testing Approaches • Bug-tracking systems (JIRA, BugZilla, Mantis) • Playtests • Subject Matter Experts • Heuristic Analysis (more on this later)

  10. Traditional QA Process • If the tuning process works, why change? • The average AAA Game: • Costs $28 million to develop • 3 years to produce • Requires constant testing by the QA staff • Requires constant revision by the developers

  11. Modified QA Cycle

  12. Visual Game Tuning (VGT)

  13. Visual Game Tuning (VGT)

  14. Visual Game Tuning (VGT)

  15. VGT Collaboration

  16. VGT-vis client

  17. VGT-game client Steering is too stiff!

  18. 1. Overview VGT-vis client 2. Zoom & Filter

  19. 2. Zoom & Filter • Zoom on most recent timeframe

  20. 3. Detail

  21. 3. Detail • Look for potential relationships

  22. 5. History

  23. VGT-game client “Dislike” “Like” Steering is too stiff! This is too hard! Try reducing speeds?

  24. 5. History • Using Indicators, we can assess user feedback

  25. 6. Extract & Save Groups

  26. 7. Update

  27. VGT-game client Much Better!

  28. VGT Architecture

  29. Visualization - Protovis • Stanford Visualization Group • Web-based (Javascript) • High Level Abstraction • Declarative Syntax

  30. Game - Unity3D • Cross-platform • High-level language support (C#, Javascript) • Web-enabled • High performance

  31. VGT Collaboration

  32. Tuning Middleware(ActionScript / RTMP) • vis client update protocol • game client update protocol

  33. VGT Future Work • More middleware needed • Database logging • A server to take care of deeper analysis • Allows for mobile lightweight clients (tablets) • Formal evaluation of cost savings • Does VGT put more burden on QA?

  34. Questions?

  35. Thank You!

  36. Background Work

  37. Heuristics • Quantitative analysis of player actions • Statistical approach to game design • Gives a way to compare different approaches

  38. Heuristics • Heuristic Evaluation for Playability (HEP) • Desurvire, H., Caplan, M., & Toth, J. A. (2004). Using Heuristics to Evaluate the Playability of Games. • Born out of the need for a standardized way to evaluate player feedback • Focuses on relevant gaming concerns

  39. Heuristic Evaluation for Playability (HEP)

  40. Interactive Visualizations • Scattering Points in Parallel Coordinates • Yuan, Guo, Xiao, Zhou, & Qu, 2009

  41. Interactive Visualizations • Interactive Dimension Reduction through User-Defined Combinations of Quality Metrics • Johansson & Johansson, 2009

  42. Interactive Visualizations • Lark: Using Meta-Visualizations for Coordinating Collaboration • Tobiasz, 2010

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