In tips & tricks, we share new clever examples of how some of our users utilize GameRefinery in their daily, weekly & monthly work.
In this tips & tricks post we’ll take a look at how to use Game Analyzer to milestone your feature development roadmap.
Game Analyzer is much much more than a playground for new game concepts. In essence, it allows you to see the market fit, closest competitors, and most importantly the strength of your prototypes feature set. This saves you time and resources before you start expensive pre-production and move to production. Some of our users figured out fast that not only can you test new concepts, but you can also utilize our +200 features to milestone their game’s Liveops game to see how the game would look like e.g., in half a year with all the features in backlog added.
How this is done can be divided into three steps:
1. Cloning an already existing game
2. Popping the hood open and start adding features in the backlog.
3. Seeing the results & comparing outcomes
Naturally, to do this you need access to the following features: Game Analyzer, Compare Games & games overview pages.
In our imaginery situation we are the product managers of Mortal Kombat.
Cloning an existing game.
First and foremost, we want to save time by cloning our game from the games overview page. This saves time and effort as the GameRefinery crew has already analyzed the game and its existing features for us!
From the upper right corner we can find the Actions-button which unlocks the Clone-game function. This allows us to port our game directly to Game Analyzer!
After cloning the game, we have access to our milestones profile.
As a good practice, it’s important to:
1. Clearly name milestones details – Name & description
2. Select the proper sub-genre for the game so our algorithms can suggest features & competitors
3. Fill in the development stage & visibility.
All this to make sure that team members who also use GameRefinery won’t get confused and that we can keep everything clean.
In our version, we have updated the games name to Mortal Kombat – H2 2020 feature roadmap to indicate that we are testing how the game would look like by the end of 2020. We also include details in the description, so its contents are clear to all team members. To make sure everyone has access to this milestone, visibility has been set team wide.
Similarly, subgenre has been set to fighting and development and live because we are tinkering with a live game.
Pop the hood and start adding features from the backlog.
For some time, our team’s coffee table conversation has been ruled by one topic: Our game lacks guild mechanics & other cool features around it.
Let’s go to town & start investigating how our game would look like after adding those features.
One cool feature in Game Analyzer is that you can add a game to benchmark your prototype against. To ensure we’re on the right track, let’s add the current live game version as a benchmark for our H2 2020 feature roadmap.
Under Social Elements we find all guild features so let’s add the following features:
– Guild mechanics
– Competitive co-op – Guild wars/competitions
– Friendly matches made possible
– Non-competitive co-op – Tasks
– Social media connection
– Chat/messaging
Time to hit the “Update Powerscore” -button.
Seeing the results & comparing the outcome.
Like with Mortal Kombat’s live version, we now have an example overview of our Mortal Kombat H2 2020 feature roadmap, where we added all six listed features. As a positive, we can already notice that our Powerscore increased from 76 to 80, indicating that we are on the right track!
As a final step, we can compare up to four games to each other on a feature level. Two games are already selected: Mortal Kombat live & Mortal Kombat H2 2020!
Let’s compare our two versions of Mortal Kombat to two other market leaders: Marvel Contest of Champions & Dragon Ball Legends to find any differences & similarities between the features in these games.
As we can see from the feature differences, we’ve taken a step in the market leaders’ direction by implementing the right features which already exist in these games. On top of that, we can also see features that Mortal Kombats live version & H2 2020 milestone both lack when compared to Marvel Contest of Champions & Dragon Ball Legends.
There are of course other tools in the GameRefinery platform that can help us find more features to implement in our games but that is another tips & tricks article topic.
Want to try Game Analyzer for yourself? Sign up for free here. An existing user and you’d like to see how this is done live? Book a demo here!
