Sink or Swim: How to Build and Validate AA Games Fast

[Music] [Music] good morning my name is Karina Comm and I am so excited to come and talk to you today that's I see myself as a Explorer type like a treasure hunter and that's why this talk is called SN or Swim uh it's a privilege to come and speak with you today uh I've been at home with living with an immune compromised person so I haven't been around as much as I'd like to um I I honestly can't believe that GDC is reaching over 24,000 people I

last checked so I've been feeling a lot more introspective and quiet as of late after quitting my awesome job at Electronic Arts last year I left that to start a new role and so it felt like I had uh jumped off a bridge onto a fast moving ship and there was a lot of pressure on me to deliver something very fast so we could support our team uh this is not a sponsored talk um but I would love to take this opportunity to show you uh what our team has been working on I don't want [Music] audio there we go uh so I'd love to show you what our team has been working on and how we were able to put together a playable game demo in just 12 months so this is never never before seen footage for upcoming closed beta in April I am a video game director working

in the crypto game space but I have a background in traditional game development I've seen my share of quality assurance game design production and project management so this gives me a unique superpower to be able to skirt in and out around the shores of game development and also sail into the ocean so by the end of this talk and by the end of GDC I hope you will think of me as your well seasoned Captain steering a ship towards a game development Horizon along the way I will share what I've learned with you on how to validate fast as a metaphor for sailing into the ocean I'm very lucky to have worked with a number of teams and I have close ties with gaming communities guilds colleagues and fans but I never ever would have thought that I would be here today speaking speaking to you at

GDC just a quick survey of hands how many of you already have a game concept that's in production great great and how many of you have a game concept that you would like to to launch in the near future awesome okay and last question uh how many of you are students who are looking to get your foot in the door and get some experience awesome um so first of all thank you so much for being here today to my talk I know there are a lot of incredible and amazing talks out there and it's it's really flattering that you came here and if you're students um thank you so much for stopping by to try to learn something from my experience um so what you will hear today is an amalgamation of everything I've learned with my background in the games industry for over 16 years um I make it a commitment every day to work with globally diverse teams and I carry

my knowledge as transparently as I can in my journey I try to help people to do their best work I've had a few jobs in the past such as I used to work for a radio station and then I worked for a ski resort and anyway I really cut my teeth working for Indie and triaa teams reporting to some of the most creative and inspiring directors from uh smaller to massive IPS uh I can tell you that I've been where you are today maybe you are looking for a new job or you're thinking about starting a new game in your your downtime um I just want to tell you that you're not alone so I'm just going to cut through the because the crypto games industry is highly volatile uh there are a lot of buzzwords that are floating around some of them don't mean anything at all they don't make any sense uh that again that's why seeing you here today is very flattering in spite of what you may or

may not know about web 3 or crypto or the metaverse this talk is all about how to validate fast and how to have fun how to make sure that your players are having fun moving from traditional game development uh I saw an opportunity to bring what I've learned from traditional game production uh and equal representation and bring it into this space um so that's why I decided to quit my awesome corporate job to to start up and become and become an indie and then launch our game using actual blockchain to power out the technology of our in-game economy to be clear I am not telling anyone to quit their job I'm just telling you what I did uh as the game director I am accountable for the overall player experience and the overall satisfaction of our players I make sure that our teams can deliver and Achieve high quality standards across many game disciplines

um and I work with a marketing team to promote and build interest for our game our game does use nfts but today I will not be discussing anything about that if you are interested in learning more then you should definitely check out our mix mob Booth today at P1 1873 please bring coffee or Donuts uh the second to less interesting fact about me is that I'm also a long-standing events director in the nonprofit space uh where I get to represent the underrepresented groups who are lgbtq plus women and asan uh it's kind of a weird flux because there's still a lot of work to get done and but all of that is to say that I truly appreciate uh how much time and effort goes into making uh these events come to life so thank you volunteers and selection committee okay so back to S away uh who

is ready to dive into the deep sea woohoo I know every team will encounter a number of game development challenges and that's why my number one goal today is to share as many stories as I can that you can use as a leader or a product owner or even as a producer today you're going to learn about all the techniques I've used to make sense of the game development world uh because just like you I too have open up jir only to discover that the project wasn't fire uh and this kind of experience transcends every project so I'll share my hardw secrets with you today in the space dealing with technical issues limited resources uh tight deadlines and scope creep and if anything of what I've just said resonates with you again just remember you are not alone a close friend and mentor of mine sitting right there James moow uh told me that smooth sailings do not make for

skilled sailors so just remember that so using mix mob as the Cornerstone example we go using mix mob as the Cornerstone example of how to validate fast um mix mob is the game that I currently work on as a game director uh it's about a futuristic survival remix game with references to meme culture fashion and music our first IP is a it's a gaming subgenre spinning card battling and card running together it's kind of like a clash Royale meets a Super Mario Kart or an endless card endless Runner meets card game we shipped the first Alpha last year while we were still working on beta technology and beta for the Millennials is is the step after Alpha it should only happen when two stages of development being a mommy Alpha and maybe another mommy beta fall in love

and they move on to a later stage in life uh they change their their status from early access to launch uh everyone is so fast moving these days so if you've joined a new team or are trialing a new technology perhaps you were also creating a new IP everything that you will learn from how to validate fast will be applicable to you in my talk we're going to learn three big takeaways on how to validate daa games fast uh there will be some time for Q&A after if we go over time there's a room just over there that we can hang out in and just to reiterate um you can find us at the mix Mah booth at P1 1873 okay uh disclaimer what you will learn your results May Vary so a mix mob the vision of our card racing strategy game came together after

creating a lean canvas and a one pager a a one pager is like a compass because they both share a simple utility and they are tools that are used to point you in a specific Direction a good one pager is concise and it is easy to read it also includes a highle feature goal because space is limited it's instrumental in condensing your information for key stakeholders uh and cond all of your key takeaways into an easily digest digestable uh one pager um so I won't be able to go into every detail but here is the anatomy of a one pager at the very least when you were creating one pager you should include about 80% of what you see here today so this is an example of a one pager and the one pager that made me want to quit my job uh notice that our game does not look anything like this at all but the

feature goals are very easy to read so this made my job as a game director very easy and if you look at this sentence right here you can see that deck building adds strategy element to vehicle racing combat this sentence alone made uh the direction for our team very clear combined with a pitch our concept was something that could have shape we could build on uh the next thing if a one pager is like a compass then the next vital instrument is a lean canvas which is like your map any good Adventurer worth their salt knows that before you go on a big adventure you need to have a map a lean canvas can take many shapes or forms and if you are a fan of using Google Maps then you also know that having a lean canvas or a a road map can really help you plan by providing

directions and the expected time of arrival uh ultimately a leant canvas can help you visualize what's in front of you it can help you to look out for danger obstacles and to avoid them it can help you to watch out for landmarks and safe areas and it can help you follow the most straightforward path to your destination because game development requires some level of awareness in order to raise funding and I tell you as much as I love this industry passion doesn't pay for my cell phone bill or my mortgage our superb CEO needed uh me and our team to launch a game within 12 months of when I received the first one pager so I can admit that uh at this stage of mix mob's development not everyone will be in the same situation as I am today our team is very fortunate to be able to raise enough money to grow our team but now there's a lot more on the line because we went from a team size of five people to

40 so at the beginning of our journey I received these two one Pages while the CEO and the EP were raising funds this is what our core concept looked like at the very beginning and then it looked like this being a prototype and then it looked like this and now it looks like this to help us get there here's an example of an early draft of a leading canvas this is what we used to help add value to our core concept and it was what we used to help uh work on the upcoming features you may already be familiar with the idea the concept of a lean business canvas uh there are certainly um multiple books on the subject from Eric ree from Steve blank and from Ash Moray

the example from before is an augmented version of the business canvas and what we use at mix mob and in case you're wondering the big difference between what you see here and what we had uh was that I've just simply removed revenue streams I never claim to be good with money because I am a treasure hunter for a reason but I can validate a game concept fast and using this method it enabled me and our team to focus on having fun at the same time so notice the these are the nine elements that we have in our lean canvas the augmented one uh let's take a step back and just dive deeper into the process of creating a lean canvas uh because again this tool is so important for your stakeholders to gain alignment and it can also help you to strategically come up with ways to validate your concept fast so in mix MOG we thought about what we loved about racing games they're

fast-paced there's quick customization and they're competitive and we smashed this together with what we loved about card gameplay and the canvas after all that work it pointed us towards a fast-paced strategy game where card gameplay could happen in real time and we used our art production design and UI advantages to help build out our metal Loop that would then attract and satisfy the needs of casual to midcore Gamers we brought this all together with the the lore and the idea of remixing culture Community uh and uh story alt together okay so I want to focus on one aspect of our lean canvas that's really important to me which should be important to you too I'm talking about

the target audience SL player segment this component in the lean canvas is all about bringing Community together it's all about setting up a pillar that is Community First everyone should think about their target audience at the end of their Dev cycle everybody should do this this is actually not as hard as it seems today it's much more simple these days because there are an unlimited number of ways to speak with early adopters even at an early stage you can do this over Discord you can do this over Twitter you can do this over telegram you can do this over forums you can do this over Reddit taking the time to truly understand your community will only lead to net positive results it's kind of like thinking of your community being your target audience SL player segment as a pond and the individual players inside of your community are kind of like your fish

like a skilled sailor knowing the types of fish that are in your pond will help you to be better prepared with the right types of baits and fishing techniques it's really important to know that every player inside of your target audience will have a unique Behavior pain Point desire um and we'll get to that in just a moment on a more experienced note you should know that there is no such thing as magic bait learning how to reach your players is something that will take skill but mostly practice and you will learn that the number of players inside of your pool player segment will also be dependent on the complexity of the market and your business strategy so there's no way that a magic formula exists and it's it's really hard and challenging to know if there's a perfect number of players

to Target what you should do however is pay special attention to your players uh and appreciate them for their uh their desires and their friction points to emphasize the challenge of making a fun game especially if you are a new team um or you starting a new IP or you're triing a new technology or you have a new job there will be a number of changing and unpredictable paths ahead and that's why you should always research your players and connect with them often who is your community in marketing terms when thinking about a player segment one should consider demographic of age gender marital status again behaviors constraints and more however in order to validate a game concept fast I prefer to focus on just two two

things the ble type is a gamer uh psychology uh and a classification of player types it's a taxonomy that was created in the 1990s it divides players into four subtypes game designers use the ble type to quickly identify the motivations of each player segment if you are a game designer then you might be aware that there are more than the four prescribed ble types but the point that I want to make here when validating fast everyone on your team should think like a designer or consult with your design team to make sure they have an understanding of your player segment because even with just four ble types you will have a basic understanding of your community and there are already features that you can start to act on right away and then the second thing is your your oh yes the second thing is your game

platform over here thank you by knowing your game platform you can make choices before you even enter your production this can save you countless hours of effort in your upfront design impementation excuse me could you help me thank you my hands are so sweaty thank you so much okay next up in our lean canvas we need to figure out what the player journey is going to be and how our business plans to serve them uh planning for the player journey is kind of like being a web Builder who needs to use a s map in order to build a good website likewise about the player Journey we in our game or product we need to have a good player Journey which starts with a clear destination that can outline the steps in between from the

start to the finish uh in order to reach the objective um the player will experience various high points and low points of satisfaction throughout the journey uh for example a player signing into to your game engaging in the firsttime user experience or connecting with a friend to play online this is all part of the player journey and since we already have a couple of personas in mind from our c number four and we are Community focused we can get started on building a player Journey because understanding the player journey is is very key to the next step you might be asking why I'm going to tell you why in order to create a value proposition we're going to have to need a a player Journey so I'm going to show you what a value proposition is um and this is kind of like a Monumental experience because

having a value proposition is kind of like telling someone that I have something that you really really really really want and it's going to make you super happy a well-crafted value proposition can help us tailor our game or product and align high level marketing strategy to better meet the desires of our players it helps us to reduce friction it also helps us to reward the players with the thing that they really want that's going to make them happy so here's an example of a value proposition I personally take so much away from this exercise because of this thing on the on the right here or I guess your left um called the jobs component uh which is kind of like the beginning of the player Journey meaning the first thing that you need to do when creating a value proposition canvas is to know first who is your end user and what is the thing that you want them to do we need to clearly list the

objectives from the player perspective and give them a to-do list a job as with any new system it's best to list out the objectives as clearly as we can while creating a player Journey this can help you a lot in the long run simply by identifying the customers's major jobs to be done we're able to empathize with their pains that they face were able to empathize with what they're trying to accomplish in their jobs to be done and the gains and the pains they perceive when they get their job completed so then understanding the gains they get and the pains that they receive from trying your your product in your player journey and the jobs that they do we can Define the most important components of our value offerings the value offering should be able to relieve the pain while also creating gains for our customers

players and when we are finally ready to put it all together we can achieve product Market fit you'll notice as you go through this exercise yourself and I have a link for this later every gain and pain should be met on both sides of this diagram every gain and pain should be connected so that we can ensure that we have valuable ins sites captured from our community here's an example of one of mix mob's quarterly planning sessions we have a few other mechanisms that help us to to make our deliverables successful and but I will save that for my next talk now before I dive any deeper I need to give a special shout out to a super cool human named Janessa Olen I have rallied with Janessa to help spread the word about working as a

producer product owner uh please check out Janessa's talk in the GDC Vault because she is able to break down the MVP in a very fabulous way to be clear I highly recommend everyone check out this talk start your minimum Violet product with a solution thank you Janessa for planting the flag now I'm going to share the MVP my humble way with help with a little friend all right quick show of hands who here has heard of the MVP okay keep keep your hands up can anyone tell me what the m stands for in MVP what's that minimal minimal fantastic yes uh minimal or minimum the m stands for minimum in MVP if it needs to solve a problem which is clear from the very beginning in a

minimal way bringing this duck here was no Co accident uh we're really winging this analogy to help prove a point but I I can't stop now GDC is footing the bill so this rubber duck is a toy which is used for entertainment and enjoyment inside and outside of a bathtub uh one could say that the top ranking features of a rubber Dock and the best rubber docks in the world are the ones that can stay afloat much like a real duck can swim and float in a water and before I go any further wise quacking game production teams know that there are thousands of variations of Doc toys out there and all of them bring entertainment and joy to children and adults everywhere in the world um and that just means that there are countless ways to think of the

MVP but the MVP is considered a friend and a foe to many people because it is rot with destrction and also constraints this is where some teams will fall into the Bermuda Triangle of good production standards and that will fall by the wayside a successful MVP uh does require some pre-work as Janessa Olen will tell you the MVP should start with a solution to a problem from the very beginning we should always look out for the most valuable offering when making an MVP otherwise you might just end up gold plating your game or product and spending needless amounts of time and resources while sacrificing overall quality to ensure that you can provide value to your players this does involve actually talking to them again this is much simpler than before

with access to social media it's very prevalent in our day-to-day and if I had to pick one aspect of validating fast it would be simply to talk to your community this is the key activity in validation 101 if you don't like talking to people then I suggest we swim on over to the nest coffee in Kua station uh and get some liquid coverage to help us out but do not lose hope and we cannot abandon ship that easily when creating an MVP there are are so many ways to think about bringing value to your customers or players as relative to their experience um they're the ones who be triing your game so when you design an MVP always think about how this might scale up just like how this floating rubber duck is the precursor to something much much bigger this is real this is the big

mama she exists all over the world in Detroit also Toronto and it can stay afloat in much rougher bodies of water so I I really want you to think about how your gameer product can stand up in the market float in the water and scale up just like the big mama duck by first satisfying the core need of your player segment and at different intervals too when we're thinking about how to validate fast we must always be able to deliver value but the challenge is in managing expectations whether it's in a bathtub or it's in the in the ocean the first version of the rubber duck for example is not going to be good it and we need to be prepared to deal with some unhappy players this is simply part of the process we must float on a sale towards all kinds of

feedback and if you do hear any negative feedback about your game or product I just suggest that you let it roll off your back just like water rolls off a well a duck you get the picture until the MVP can bring True Value to our player segment it's a good idea to keep iterating and iterating and iterating as you move from alpha to Beta so one last thing that I have to tell you about the men M Violet product is that this does not imply thinking inside of the box when it comes to story brand and identity this is something that can demonstrably separate you from your competitors and that's why just to iterate understanding the core value of what people want in your game or product is key to building MVP so that you can scale up and add your brand and identity on top so let let's look slow it down again and get into some nitty

gritties this is some technique can anyone tell me what is the definition of a prototype anyone tell me that the ear version of product good so you said an early version of your product yes that's great it's an early version or sample of a product service or system that's great and the goal of the end the Prototype is to quickly test and to validate your concept or idea prototyping can take many many different forms whether it's a Sketchbook or it's a more advanced mockup uh until you move into a more you know physical or digital mode uh a prototype is really cheap to make it's actually much more cheaper than MVP and we don't need expensive tools to get started building a prototype quickly aligns all of your stakeholders uh and then the prototype then becomes the next jumping off point for everybody and any

feedback that you get from your prototype will help you decide if you want to move uh and spend more time on on your MVP so just by using tools such as mirro uh plus some good prototyping practices any game designer can create a game Prototype using a variety of basic household things again it could be a SketchBook it could be Bits of Paper and some string it could you could be using a 3D printer creating a physical prototype is really simple creating a digital prototype can be also completed with uh tools like twine or game builder or Unity when we are validating fast we must remember that the goal is to test our prototype again the this is much simpler with the introduction of Discord Twitter and social

media even itch.io an amazing platform and all we need to do to test a a prototype is to gather a group of potential players and observe their behavior taking notes of their unfettered opinion with deference since the outbreak of Co the most popular form of user testing has quickly become remote testing but here are some other forms of testing that you should be aware of I can't go into all the details today but I encourage you to ask your ux team or your design team about these forms of user testing all of these methods and forms are ways for us to test and become laser focused on what essential features are going to move the needle uh and having said that when conducting a user Test please do not try to do all of this at once uh the goal is

to focus on a limited number of questions if we do not focus on a limited number of questions then we will get too much feedback and that's not very helpful either so in order to get the most valuable insights and build that into your usability experience it's important to keep things limited and to stay as unbiased as possible so that we do not influence the actions of our play tester all right folks I'm having a ton of fun here talking to you but we're coming to the pen ultimate chapter so let's finish strong when you're out on the Open Sea we are embarking on a Grand Adventure and we're in full view which is kind of like filming a TV show in front of a live audience except the audience stays there there even after the cameras are off nothing is rolling there is no laugh

track it can be the same thing When developing a game out in full view because your users will always be there so we might be asking ourselves why would anyone want to be an open view when the audience never goes away which sounds problematic and it is in spite of the implications especially as a startup team the reasons why we want to be on the open in production while it's in progress um is that we get immediate feedback um which saves time and money on validating assumptions fast we also have access to super fans which help to reduce testing Cycles uh and can help us receive game crushing bugs sooner uh we get extra user testing re uh research which help us to map out the next step and and morale improvements

ironically there's a different type of energy when we need to perform live take it from me and uh when you're live producing content when you successfully deliver something it can boost all morale it feels really good I encourage you to do it so as a game designer uh sailing out in the open is generally a good idea but since this chapter is called ship fast in the open I am going to share some challenges to shipping fast so one moving fast is not sustainable because we might end up in a rush when we are in a rush just like you are in Sonic if you're rushing to the end of the level uh you might miss an awesome PowerUp along the way when I first joined mix mob last year in March there were five main stakeholders including a fantastic project manager and we were moving so fast to adjust to the the market conditions because this was a high before the recession and before our crypto internet

money fell horribly due to to reasons um I won't go into too much detail there either um but I really knew that I was on The Cutting Edge of something when I felt that stabbing pain all around is all of a sudden right after mix M was able to secure a 40ers team with funding coming from a number of Partners who all believed in web 3 and in true ownership uh there were a number of growing pains that we had to encounter and this probably led us to to missing a few powerups along the way so as we were moving fast we felt like we were wild raccoons getting our hands into everything all of our ideas everything everywhere and all at once this was truly startup life all of us moving fast as a small company got harder as we grew as more people were being onboarded onto our vision and meant every day when I went to work something new and exciting would alter

our production and change our sailing angle just slightly we were moving so fast to adapt to the Grand visions of the executives who wanted an multi massive online game uh the creative team who wanted an augmented reality in XR game and the CEO who simply just wanted to get to revenue like yesterday and that's why moving fast is effective in the short term but it's not something that I would recommend for the long term because our expectations versus reality will always be skewed so now I'm going to share some best practices on how to mitigate rushing because on the other hand on the other hand moving fast is how our team was able to produce a new game with franchisable IP and live streamable features in just 12 months so here are the top two things you can do to avoid issues when moving fast so

first thing is get yourself a nice change request process and integrate into your communication plan and then set up a risk register lastly I need all of you to go and annoy all of your stakeholders and communicate with them if you don't know what a change re Quest process is or if you don't realize the importance of a change request then allow me to change your mind a change request is a sexy little process which is just a method of communication by remembering to be inclusive of all the stakeholders who are decision makers for your project we can avoid confusion uh and avoid making assumptions here are some things that you should consider when creating your own change request uh the status approved denied or in progress your stakeholders if you can call them out by name even

better uh this one is the complexity or the estimation of change and I know that there are some developers here who shiver me timbers we think about estimations I just hate them and that's fine but I say to you you cannot change what you cannot measure you cannot improve on what you cannot measure estimations are key and then lastly assessment notes if you see that Duty or complexity of the change request that there will be an impact your work in progress or some sort of scope displacement uh put them into your notes just like that there's more information that you can read up on change requests and change managements from the project management Institute or Prince or agile any agile training you can learn about change management there uh the next thing that you should be aware of there is a lot of danger and

uncertainty when moving fast because of a psychological phenomenon called intentional blindness this was tested in an experiment called The Invisible Gorilla experiment since the games industry uh can be compared to people losing their bananas and there just a lot of monkey memes I thought this would be relevant um The Monkey Business illusion or The Invisible Gorilla illusion demonstrates that when people are focused on a particular task or object they can become suddenly unaware of the other stimuli within their perfum sometimes this happens when that thing is directly in front of them so if you haven't heard of this Invisible Gorilla experiment two cognitive scientists back in the 1999 created a video where they demonstrated this effect students were asked to pass a basketball between themselves and viewers were asked to count the number of times the players

with the white shirts pass the basketball to each other however what the viewer failed to notice is that Midway through this exercise a person in a gorilla outfit comes into the circle and beats their chest and walks away it sounds absurd I know um but it's one of the most famous psychological demos ever so when we move fast we risk in intentional blindness because we enter tunnel vision this makes us ignore our surroundings and although unintentional we also fail to notice what's in front of us did anyone see the gorilla you saw the gorilla not until I said it you see it now so that's why we should have a discussion with the other leaders in our team often to talk about risks and when I say risk this can be positive or it could be negative I really want us to

debunk the myth that risk is something scary in fact we should embrace risks more often because there will always be uncertainties on the horizon so that's why setting up something called a risk register is not a bad idea it's just a process that I recommend any team to set up and add to their calendars and just to commit to doing because simply identifying risks is valuable to your team whether they are positive or negative implementing a response plan to the risk that's upcoming can help us to be more prepared to transfer avoid mitigate accept or enhance the risks in our gamer product so in this diagram here this is a a risk analysis and let's say something of high consequence with Hy probability is about to happen very soon then that means our

response plan is now immediate and it takes the highest priority that means our response plan needs to happen like today or tomorrow effective immediately but on the other hand if you see a risk or an event of uncertainty which is low consequence and low probability then you might just want to accept the risk just to keep things moving if I could go back in time and ask the CEO of the most reputable and Innovative cryptocurrency exchanges if he thought that his company would declare bankruptcy and that he would also be criminally charged with eight counts of felonies being fraud Securities and commodities fraud um that would not occur to me at the time because I was so focused on making a good game but even so that is what happened even so so we can't predict all risks is what I'm trying to tell you and that's a a

wonderful thing about risks because whether they are positive or whether they are negative there is value in discussing risks and adding it to what we know presently that's why when analyzing risks making sure that you have a response plan to address the risk can help you be more aware of political legal and environmental events that are just on the horizon positive or negative risks could Rock any vessel that's why I strongly recommend to please set up a risk register into your production as a defensive and proactive way to be prepared and hell if if everything Breaks Loose um and you fail then then so what the greatest failure is not actually having failed the greatest failure is neglecting to have learned anything the best thing you can do when all hell Breaks Loose is to hang on to your MVP tight uh and stay in the critical path

and just refuse to sink just remember that everything worth doing takes time and Rome wasn't built in a day my personal favorite here is a metaphor you can't make a baby in one month with nine childbearing people things do and change every day technology never be as slow as it is today this slide is just here to remind you to be patient because the chances are you are not going to make a hit game in your first try but the goal is to validate fast so that you can pivot before you run out of funding so to wrap things up saing fast and in the open is challenging but it is a unique opportunity to learn from your players and to adap dep change although there is no magic solution to be

successful what we need to remember above all else is to have fun we are so privileged to work in the entertainment and creative sector and so that's why when things get tough I have included some daily affirmations for you this is what has kept me afloat as the crypto Market was crashing and it's impossible to think that all of our plans will go to plan so having a life buoy throughout this turbulent time is as simple as carrying yourself with compassion curiosity and Innovation by the end of our 12-month Runway our team was able to use all the techniques that I've delivered to you today to incrementally increase our game production with valuable features that make our game fun to play and since the Inception of the one pager we have raised enough money thankfully through the collection of 5,000 digital assets and we delivered our first game Prototype in April of 2022 by September of 2022 players could

access the game through web 3 and iOS on their phones and by this year in January they were able to stream live tournaments where they could also invite others through referrals to come and play play our fun game oh and we also were able to hit our goal of getting onto VR so that happened huzzah thank you thank you thank you if anything from my talk uh was inspiring or interesting to you then I can also recommend that you pick up some books here uh they will explain a lot more than I can in the short amount of time that I have to about the lean canvas the value proposition and some critical thinking in summary get a compass get a map build a rubber duck then ship fast and in the open also take the time to know your players and have compassion for yourself above all else that you've learned in syn or Swim just refuse to sink so

lastly please give it up to all the volunteers and the amazing staff at GDC with a round of applause because this is my first time at GDC so I too have felt like I am literally sinking or swimming their dedication has made uh this conference very exciting for me and just a pleasure to be here thank you yeah so um I guess my question would be how would you know whether your MVP is bringing value to your players so the question being How will I know when the MVP brings value to my players well that's interesting because the only way that you can know whether the MVP brings value to your players is to ask them it's really challenging for lots of teams to know whether the MVP delivers value to their players you just simply have to to ask them if you find through your forms of user testing that they are positive and they're supportive

of your your upcoming feature then that's a pretty good indicator that you you have achieved value and product Market fit um but largely the only way that you can find out if this is true is just to ask them okay sweet thank you thanks for your question my name is s i I have one oh sorry you can go go ahead you're waiting hey Karina um I had a question for you so a lot of your talk was around uh creating a a prototype an MVP for your audience a lot of games uh that are starting up for funding don't have an audience yet right they don't have that Community how do you recommend people to go about building that or like what were tips and tricks that uh mix mob did to find a community that wanted a game like this okay so the question is um if you are a startup team or a new team you're starting a new IP or you want to create an MVP how will you find your your

target audience how will you find those play testers yeah okay so I I'm very fortunate to come from Vancouver BC uh there's a plethora of communities out there who will go to coffee shops they'll go to board game stores you can see them uh a GDC for example um sometimes you have to go and find them that's part of the role of Community manager and just part of your your job effectively is to find those people uh and validate your concept fast um given that you may not have any funding to go and do this I can see what that might be a challenge um again Twitter is a a great place to just post up a hashtag screenshot Saturday I think is what it it's called you can test out um just some AB tests of your product very quickly um itch.io is also place that's free that you can go to and you can put your game up there and just try it game jams are another fantastic way

to to go and do that um so just to iterate you can go to a physical place like a board game store a coffee shop you can go online through social media you can also go through a platform like steam or itch I hope that answers your question it does thank you thank you hi Karina my name is Evan um one question I had was what learnings or what's your latest thinking on how much of games kind of Stack should be on versus offchain meaning like what parts of items should shouldn't be nfts versus um benefiting from just the scale of the regular multiplayer life service stack that exists today like how do you think about that not that accessible from a front other perspectives right that a lot of AAA games doua game players are used to today so just wondering based on your experience like what do you think

going forward the optimal mix is for game devs that choose to incorporate web three elements like what's the right mix of that on the um backend side right so how many stocks should be used inside of our our game if you want it to be accessible and especially you know web 3 there scalable number of of of stocks and how do we make it scalable okay that's a challenging question um so ideally you would be on all chains all at once everywhere at at one time but this is very challenging to do because you know it's so many servers so many different code bases there' be a lot in your way as bu entry I would suggest uh thinking about it the other way the opposite in just making a fun experience first before you go onto any chain you have to validate that the utility of what you have to offer for any Avatar system or any scalable feature in in the future is is fun so before you go onto salana or blockchain

or ethereum or polygon or or whatever um make sure that your game does have an applicable utility for the use of a digital asset or multiplayer service uh and try to hang in hang in there for as long as you can before you launch into a chain once you're on chain it's really hard to come back it's one thing I've learned about web 3 and the crypto games IND it's kind of like building a skate park you have to be very careful with your measurements because once it's out there it's really hard to patch so if you can contain it all uh in locally and make sure that it's fun first then when you are ready to go on your chain to go to everything everywhere all at once um it will be a much smoother transition does that answer the question yep great thanks thanks Evan thank you Karina and congratulations on your first talk at GDC oh thank you um so I would talking about validation and failing quickly as well as part of that process so how do you know when to make the call to either

scale or start scaling up a product versus saying it's done and pivot or to move on okay so how do we know when to scale up at the different intervals so once you should always be doing this because uh creating your MVP the first stage it's not going to be good at all might be pretty bad uh and that's part of managing expectations um so the first MVP we know is not going to be very good we should always be incrementally adding value to our MVP because in the long run this only benefits us um it will add more features to your players will hopefully make them happy um it will uh help you to optimize your experience overall and improve on some of the things you saw in the first MVP prototype test um and it will prepare you to scale in the future so I I don't not sure that's a good answer for you um but you know start with the core nugget

of what you want to build and your MVP and make sure that it delivers value to your players if you were successful at that point um there's a question about you know talking to your players as well how to validate that if you are successful in proving you provide value to your players then you should always be finding a way to include more stuff your MEP to continue to build always awesome thank you thank you all right that's all the folks the time that we have thank you so much everyone oh oh one last thing sorry about that one last thing um there will be a GDC evaluation that will be sent to you so if you like this talk please go ahead and fill it out so that you can be invited back for second GDC talk if you like what you hear today I can tell you more next

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