Designing a mobile game to generate player data -- lessons learned
This provides guidance for researchers without development experience who need to create games for data generation, but it is incremental as it builds on existing tools without introducing new methods.
The authors tackled the lack of established best practices for designing mobile games for research by developing 'RPGLite' as a case study, resulting in a set of lessons learned about effective amateur game development for research purposes.
User friendly tools have lowered the requirements of high-quality game design to the point where researchers without development experience can release their own games. However, there is no established best-practice as few games have been produced for research purposes. Having developed a mobile game without the guidance of similar projects, we realised the need to share our experience so future researchers have a path to follow. Research into game balancing and system simulation required an experimental case study, which inspired the creation of "RPGLite", a multiplayer mobile game. In creating RPGLitewith no development expertise we learned a series of lessons about effective amateur game development for research purposes. In this paper we reflect on the entire development process and present these lessons.