Since this project was a collaborative work between University of Skövde and Subfrost Interactive, before contacting the dev-team, I was assigned to form a group with two of my classmates.

We made sure to write-up a contract to establish some ground rules about our availability, and how the project would go on for the upcoming weeks.

During our first meeting with the developers, we clarified and wrote down the goals for the collaboration period. The developers main goal was reaching to more of their target audience through another gaming platform, while keeping an eye on the potential competitors.

Even though they were working on their next game at the time, they were open to the idea of improving Cobots’ experience if it would beneficial from releasing it on the new platform.

After our discussions with the developers, as a team, we split up our workflow so every member had a clear focus point. For the market research we decided to each take certain regions to focus on, and for the on-site playtests we made sure to always be present as a group.

I primarily focused on analyzing the European region market for the target platform, and conducting both observational and remote playtest sessions to pin-point any issues that might arise with the port of the game, all while leading the communication channels with the developers to book in meetings and have discussions about our progress.

Throughout the whole collaboration, we were able to conduct two types of playtest sessions; observational and remote playtests.

Throughout the playtest sessions, it was clear that the participants were having a hard time noticing the timer, the robot count, and the ability to change the camera angle to clear the level. A lot of testers were running out of time, or got confused when they ran out of robots to play as before they got to complete the level.

Having the interviews right after conducting the playtests helped players to give better feedback about their experience. The questions were focused on when and why they stopped playing, the overall difficulty curve, how much they would be willing to pay for the game, and how much have they felt like a completionist when playing the game.

Once the interview was over, I asked the participants to re-arrange elements on the HUD, and see how they would place the UIs throughout the screen.

Almost all the participants agreed on placing the timer at the top middle of the screen, and they grouped the active robot and chip indicators together. The placement for controls reference was the only element where the participants' answers did not match.

Even though playtesters were able to tell us some details about the how the levels went, we wanted to formulate it in a way to make an overall analysis.

To be able to measure the difficulty, we came up with a formula for difficulty, by basing the difficulty level (D) of the first level as 1.

As a solution for the playtesters missing out on the controls, similar to 9-slicing sprites, splitting the HUD into 8 zones (ignoring middle-center) for UI elements to be placed can help the players customize their HUD with the way that they would prefer.

A setting would pop-up a screen similar to the mockup shown below, and the players would have the ability to drag and drop the UI elements to the places that are available.

For the market research, I was in charge of keeping track of the puzzle games released in the European region on the platform’s e-store. Several categories were noted down and grouped for every two weeks, to base the estimations.

All the data collected were recorded neatly to provide methods for successful marketing and announcing the game on the new platform.