Quality Requirements in Mobile Games

1
Quality Requirementsin Mobile Games

• Ville Vatén
• Head of Post Production / Telcogames
• 8.11.2006

2
Agenda

• Telcogames introduction
• Introduction to quality requirements
• Gaming and technical qualities
• Requirements process
• Portability
• Performance
• Screen scalability

3
Telcogames Introduction

• Global publisher and distributor of mobile games
• 1000 games portfolio in distribution
• Offices in 9 countries, HQ in London
• 3 studios developing smartphone games
• Magic Productions in France
• Fathammer in Finland (acquired in June 2006)
• Fathammer Asia in Korea
• Vision mission
• smartphone performance, user experience,
  conversion rate, price point
• the leading publisher of native smartphone titles

4
Quality Requirements in Games

• What is the most important quality of any
  commercial application from publisher point of
  view?

PROFITABILITY!
5
Building profitable games

• Software qualities
• Gaming qualities
• Technical qualities
• Other
• Brand recognition
• Marketing
• Distribution
• Pricing
• Development cost

6
Gaming qualities

• Soft qualities
• Easy to pick up
• Difficult to master
• Addictive and fun
• Entertaining visually, audibly attractive
• Usability, playability
• Challenging to measure
• Input vs. reward
• Different preferences

7
Technical qualities

• Customer satisfaction
• Bug free
• Device coverage
• Language coverage
• Development effectiveness gt cost
• Cost effectiveness/fast time to market
• Portability
• Localizability
• Testability

8
Requirements process
channels
certification
channels
certification
certification
channels
GCD
Market analysis
Game production
Post production
Backfill
...
TRC
handsets
languages
new handsets
new handsets
new languages
new languages

• Continuous testing

9
Portability

• Bring the game cost-effectively and quickly to
  multiple different handsets
• Variability in multiple dimensions
• Platform
• Controls
• Screen size
• Audio
• Performance
• CPU, GPU, memory and disk
• Network
• Localization

10
Performance requirements

• Derived from playable, entertaining, and visually
  appealing
• Depends on genre and title
• Variability needed for different performance
  handsets
• Difficult to define explicitly

11
Performance scalability

• Performance, Visual Appearance, Frame Rate

High frame rate Low visual appearance
High frame rate High visual appearance
low handset performance high
frame rate
Minimum level
Low frame rate Low visual appearance
Low frame rate High visual appearance
Visual appearance adjustment
12
Visual appearance adjustments

• Scene complexity
• Amount of objects
• Polygon count
• Number of meshes in polygons
• Object coating
• Texture resolution
• Materials and blending
• Perspective correction
• Distance
• Far clip plane distance
• Possible Visible Set
• Backdrop mechanism
• Dynamic LOD for game objects
• Amount and complexity of eye candy effects
• Size of rendering window

13
Mobile vs. PC performance

• Mobiles
• fixed hardware per device
• a dozen platforms with universal binaries
• visuals adjustments only on build time
• PCs
• highly configurable hardware and drivers
• one binary for an infinite amount of
  configurations
• visuals adjustments on run time

14
Testing performance

• Gameplay testing of all levels on different
  performance devices
• Visual appearance variability testing
• Code review and testing
• Content modifications testing
• Hardware and software rendering

15
Screen scalability

• Resolutions from 176x208 to 640x480
• Different aspect ratios
• Orientation changeable during gameplay
• Power-per-pixel problems

352 x 416
240 x 320
320 x 240
240 x 240
176 x 208
208 x 208
16
Screen scalability

• Solutions
• Code aligned floating elements
• Layout configuration files
• Vector graphics
• Double pixels

17
Screen scalability testing

• Run game in different resolutions
• Code and content review

18
Conclusion

• Most portability requirements can actually be
  derived to definable low level features
• But how to define features for game to be
  addictive?

19
Discussion

• Ville Vatén
• ville.vaten_at_telcogames.com
• More info
• www.telcogames.com
• www.fathammer.com