Creating games using the CBL methodology (Part 1) – Merge ‘em Up
How the Apple methodology helped me and my team create a MVP for a mobile game
Welcome to a series of 3 medium posts where I, Juliana Furtado, will guide you through my experience on building games for the Apple Store throughout the wild experience of the Apple Academy back in 2017.
Let’s start at the beginning, my first project. As a designer I had to be in a group with other 4 developers (Ricardo Rachaus, Pedro Castro, Matheus Clemente e Felipe Rodrigues) so we could brainstorm together and come up with either a game or app solution in 3 months.
As I’ve explained before on how the CBL was used to create an app, this methodology can also be used to create games, or at least it’s MVPs.
Just to refresh your memories on the methodology of the Challenge Based Learning (CBL) where I explain with deeper details in [this article], it’s a process guided by one Big Idea and a sequence of exploitative questions that will make us learn and understand more about this Big Idea.
Those question are grouped in Essential and Guiding Questions, in which the first one is more general questions and the second includes more specific and technical questions about the solution itself.
Some examples of Essential Question around the Big Idea of “Game”
1- What’s the best approach for an iOS game?
2- What are the most played games on App Store?
3- What’s the average time of phone gaming?
4- What are the most downloadable game categories on App Store?
And so on…
In order to move on, we have to look up for the answers of this first question group. Sometimes the answers can make us come up with new Essential questions or even Guiding Questions. There’s no problem on adding or keeping them for later.
After answering, or trying to answer all of the questions (it’s okay to let some unanswered), we can move on to the Guiding questions. But what’s the difference?
Guiding questions are more technical questions about the game itself. Below you can check some examples:
1- How do we define our levels?
2- How will the interaction be with the characters?
3- What’s the game category?
4- How many levels there will be?
5- How will it be monetized?
6- What’s the best software to develop for iOS?
7- How many characters there will be and what will they do?
You can make as many questions as you want and feel it’s enough to give all the base knowledge you need.
Just like in the first step, now we answer the questions and start to mold a structure to our game.
The guiding activities are next and we have to point out what we have to do to get to the final product: researches, studies, work timeline, how will we organize our work (will it be by sprints or kanban?)
Now that we learned about the Big Idea, have things planned and documented, we start sketching down the prototype.
And here is how one of the games, Merge ‘em up, came to life. We started with a paper sketch just to materialize what we have been thinking throughout the process and test the idea.
After testing, iterating and enhancing the prototype, we came up with a MVP game where you challenge yourself to go further in every attempt. There’s also a level of complexity in which the player can merge different colors to come up with a new one that will give you bonus points. We also came up with a tool in case the player seems stuck, they can color a blank square that may change their game and push further to the leaderboard!
You can access a gameplay video on the link below
Another product strategy we thought was the monetization. How would we keep the game working and evolving? We came with a first solution of an in-app shop.
After that, two other projects came to life: Klement’s Attack and Western Land. Both games followed the same principles of discovery, documentation and delivery.
Follow up for more creative process on Klement’s Attack and Western Land. Thank you for reading!
