Designing a mobile game to generate player data -- lessons learned

TL;DR

This paper shares lessons learned from developing 'RPGLite', a multiplayer mobile game created by researchers without prior game development experience, to guide future research-oriented game design.

Contribution

It provides a set of practical lessons and insights for amateur researchers to develop mobile games for research purposes effectively.

Findings

Identified key challenges in amateur game development.

Provided best practices for designing research-oriented mobile games.

Shared practical lessons to streamline future research game creation.

Abstract

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.