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Game designer at Kipsta
As a trainee for 2 months at Kipsta, I worked in a team on the prototyping of penalty shootout games for Decathlon's sports gamification project.
Photo from one of the playtest sessions we carried out
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Project overview
This gamification project uses Computer Vision technology. Thanks to the camera of the phone placed on a tripod at a good distance from the goal; the ball, the goal and the player are detected in real time. This allows us to use values such as the speed of the ball or the position of the player in our games.
The team:
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3 game designers
Production time: 2 months full-time
Genre: gamification of penalty shoot-outs
Engine: Figma
Number of players: Solo and multiplayer games
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My role
During my two-month internship, I mainly worked on the development of the games in their first prototyped versions on Google Sheet, and I was responsible for carrying out playtests with the children at the Kipsta academy.
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The company
Front of the Kipstadium at Tourcoing
KIPSTA has been designing products for footballers of all levels for over 20 years now, and since 2015 the global design and development centre for its products has been located at the crossroads of three towns in the Lille Metropolitan Area: Roubaix, Wattrelos and Tourcoing.
In addition to football, KIPSTA designs products for many team sports, including basketball, rugby, volleyball, handball and others.
The Kipstadium building is home to all the skills involved in designing high-quality, high-performance products, including product managers, product and field test engineers, data analysts and marketing teams.
What's more, the equipment on site allows the design process to run very smoothly. The site has a workshop with a range of industrial machines for making alterations, test machines for putting products through their paces in a variety of conditions, as well as a number of indoor and outdoor fields for trying out equipment in real conditions on the target audience.
Last but not least, there is an important component that is part of the design process of the KIPSTA teams: innovation. Each product is designed to be better than its predecessor, while at the same time meeting users' expectations. It's this quest for innovation that pushes the teams into new areas, such as the gamification project that I joined during my work placement.
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Goals and expectations
Photo from the kipsta website
I did this internship with two other classmates, with the aim of designing an advanced prototype of 3 penalty shootout games to provide a first concrete experience as part of a complete application.
In the following, I won't describe the exact concept of each game. I'll concentrate on my work in carrying out the playtests and review the various problems I encountered and how I solved them.
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Intentions
The primary aim of this application is to motivate children between the ages of 8 and 13 to play longer and more often, while enjoying physical activity.
The target audience is not limited to regular exercisers, but extends to children of all levels.
To make the most of the experience, you'll need a soccer goal and a large enough garden.
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The games
Infinity striker
In Infinity Striker, choose a grid and try to score in the announced squares to win points. You have 3 attempts per square, and the game ends after the 3rd failed shot. Earn even more points by hitting the first shot several times in a row!
Simon football
In Simon Football, choose a grid and memorise the series of squares announced. At each level, the number of squares to memorise increases. Shoot each square in order, making 3 attempts per square. The game ends if you miss all 3 attempts.
Passe D'
Play against your friend in Passe D' mode. At the start of each round, each player places the opposing player's attackers on the grid. Players have 3 rounds to win as many points as possible by finding their respective attackers and passing to them.
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Process
"Paper" prototype on Google Sheet
After conceptualizing the game and validating the concept with the lead. I create a quick prototype on Google Sheet. This was a useful step in quickly testing the game.
Playtests & iterations
Using the Google Sheet prototype, we can quickly carry out playtests and easily iterate afterwards.
Advanced prototype on Figma
After extensive testing, we're putting together a more complete version on Figma, with a tutorial, animations and a more ergonomic wireframe. Of course, we're continuing to get our players to test the game.
Documentation
Throughout this process, I keep documentation up to date to create efficient versioning and make the project easier to understand for the people who will work on it after us.
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"Paper" prototype on Google Sheet
Screenshot of the prototype on Google Sheet of the game Infinity Striker
In the process, what made life a lot easier for us at first were the small prototypes on Google Sheet. As our games were quite simple, we could quickly design a “paper” version to easily test ideas.
From a more technical point of view, Google Sheet enabled us to go quite far in automating tasks thanks to various formulas and scripts written in JavaScript. I spent some time familiarizing myself with the language and, after a few unsuccessful attempts, I was able to create scripts used as macros in Google Sheet to launch games according to the grid selected by the player.
The scripts were very useful for creating controlled randomness. As a reminder, in Infinity Striker or Simon Football, the squares that the player must aim at are defined randomly by the computer. But soon after testing, we realized that total randomness wasn't enough to allow us to control the difficulty curve over the course of the game. So another member of the team drew up precise rules which I was then able to script and integrate into the Google Sheet prototype. From now on, the player is less likely to come across difficult squares at the start of the game, and two squares in a row are never adjacent, so that the player regularly changes shooting zones.
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Playtests & iterations
Photo of one of the playtest sessions we carried out
Right from the start of the internship, we tried to do as many tests as possible. A big advantage of the Kipstadium is the large number of children, of different ages and levels. For us, this was ideal: the kid were willing enough to play our games, which enabled us to do a lot of iterations with rapid feedback on the experience.
Thanks to the playtests, one or more problems can then be noted. Some complex problems involving game rules may require a further brainstorm. Thanks to this and other related research, a solution is found that seems relevant and is tested again. For more minor problems (bugs, interface not always easy to read), changes are made fairly quickly to avoid accumulating them for no reason, and to always have the cleanest version possible.
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Advanced prototype on Figma
In-game screenshot of the game Infinity Striker
Once we were satisfied with the rules and the Google Sheet prototype, we used Figma to create an interface that was more beautiful, immersive and representative of the final result. Thanks to the first prototype, we knew exactly how the application would work and what the result would be. What's more, Figma's comprehensive system of variables enabled us to create a much more advanced and complete version of each game.
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Documentation
Extract from the documentation I wrote for the kipsta team
During the course, we made sure that we kept up-to-date documents to explain the rules of each game and also how certain aspects of the application worked. This also enabled us to save earlier versions of the games if we needed to.
But the main challenge was also to ensure that the Kipsta teams who would be taking over the project in a few months would be able to understand our work, our choices and the direction of the project at the time of our internship. Apart from the rules of the game, we also had to explain how the various models and prototypes we had produced worked.
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Challenges encountered
Game experience did not meet expectations
At the beginning of the internship, we took up the work done during the workshop previously done, concentrating on the first game, 9 in a row. But soon after playing a few games with the children or ourselves in the field, we came across problems of score balancing, as well as a malfunction between the streak system and the limited duration of the games.
In the first version of 9 in a row, the game ended for all players after nine shots, but depending on the moment at which the player launched a streak (a sequence of two successful shots on the first try), the difference in points was too significant and could lead to a situation where a less efficient player had obtained a better score than another player who had made more successful shots.
Once we had identified the problem, we thought about implementing solutions using the streak system. For us, it's this element that makes the goal-shooting experience even more satisfying, as it adds extra pressure to each successful square to avoid losing the streak, and a potentially big points bonus. After a few ideas noted during a team brainstorm, we decided to deviate from the original concept and remove the nine-square limit to complete the game. From now on, the player plays as long as he or she succeeds, and tries to score the highest score with an infinite number sequence but if he fails 3 times on the same square, the game is ended. This is how we renamed the game Infinity Striker.
Explaining simple ideas with a certain depth of gameplay
Our third game takes the naval battle format and adapts it to the world of soccer. And this was no easy task. The unintuitive nature of some of the rules made the explanations more complex than they needed to be, but as the iterations progressed we found an effective way of conveying the rules.
This was also one of the challenges to be taken into account throughout the game design process. The principle and operation of the game must be easily understood by the player, a child of between 8 and 13 years of age. If not, interest is lost. To avoid this pitfall, we've created pictorial tutorials to summarize the game in a few lines, in addition to the full explanation video that the player can watch in the application on the game's profile page.
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Conclusion
Photo from the kipsta website
During this internship, I was able to put to good use all the skills I had acquired during my years of study. To stay organized and deliver a result that matched expectations, I had to keep my schedule up to date and communicate regularly with the other members of my team, skills already worked on and reinforced throughout my projects at school.
Most of the time I worked independently, managing my time and prioritizing my tasks. The regular supervision and availability of my internship supervisor enabled me to work in excellent conditions, to make progress in the direction I had set myself and to further strengthen the skills I already possessed.
From a more technical point of view, I learned to carry out tests with younger players, who can be easily distracted, which brings other interesting constraints to deal with. I also deepened my knowledge of Figma for creating quick interfaces and Google Sheets for creating small, simple algorithms. Finally, the questions surrounding the design choices were very demanding, and quite unique given the constraints specific to this fusion of digital and sport.