Quality Requirements in Mobile Games Ville Vatén Head of Post Production / Telcogames

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

Telcogames Introduction  Global publisher and distributor of mobile games  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

Quality Requirements in Games What is the most important quality of any commercial application from publisher point of view? PROFITABILITY!

Building profitable games Software qualities –Gaming qualities –Technical qualities Other –Brand recognition –Marketing –Distribution –Pricing –Development cost

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

Technical qualities Customer satisfaction –Bug free –Device coverage –Language coverage Development effectiveness => cost –Cost effectiveness/fast time to market –Portability –Localizability –Testability

Requirements process Game productionPost production Market analysis TRC GCD new handsets channels Transition phase new languages certification Backfill new handsets channels new languages... languages certification handsets channels Continuous testing certification

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

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

Performance scalability Performance, Visual Appearance, Frame Rate High frame rate Low visual appearance Low frame rate Low visual appearance High frame rate High visual appearance Low frame rate High visual appearance Visual appearance adjustment frame rate low handset performance high Minimum level

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

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

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

Screen scalability Resolutions from 176x208 to 640x480 Different aspect ratios Orientation changeable during gameplay Power-per-pixel problems 176 x 208 x x x x x 240

Screen scalability Solutions –Code aligned floating elements –Layout configuration files –Vector graphics –Double pixels

Screen scalability testing Run game in different resolutions Code and content review

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

Discussion Ville Vatén More info: