This was a 14 week project with a team comprised of 5 students. The aim of the project was to use data and find innovative ways boost organic installs and increase player retention.
Role
Project Manager and Data Analyst
Tools Used
Excel, Google BigQuery and Grafana
Gold Mania! is an all-new CASUAL arcade experience where players from all over the world join in daily, weekly and 28-day challenges to win REAL-WORLD PRIZES!
Design Process
The ideation phase at the beginning of this project was influenced from design sprint practices in which I facilitated as the scrum master.
As a team, we generated our initial solutions by following the “The Sprint Book” by Jake Knapp with John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz.We did the following exercises:
How Might We: It is is an analytical technique relying on actionable questions asked from a particular point of view on a specific problem.
Ideas: Twenty minutes. Privately jot down some rough ideas. Circle the most promising ones.
Crazy 8: Eight minutes. Fold a sheet of paper to create eight frames. Sketch a variation of one of your best ideas in each frame. One minute per sketch.
My Contribution
SCRUM MASTER
Daily standup at the Kanban board. We assigned tasks and prioritized them in the level of importance.
Sprint Review. Every week, I would facilitate a review where each team member will show their progress to the entire team and the team will give suggestions if there is a scope of improvement. Tasks are then moved to either backlog section or to the done section on the Kanban board.
Ideation Exercises. Following a scrum methodology means lots of iteration and we as a group constantly had to do this whether it was about new features, or failed iterations.
Project Manager
Project Plan Document. I made a detailed project plan showing all the aspects of the project like scope, risk, responsibilities, deliverables and project schedule with critical path.
Project Tracker. I created two detailed project trackers, one for handling each sprint and one for sprint tasks. These trackers were updated after every standup and sprint review. These trackers helped me to keep the team on track and we were able to deliver the product at least a week before the actual delivery. They even had critical path task that would I would closely monitor to make sure that all the tasks are completed.
Communication Management. I lead all the client meetings and standup. I would make sure that client is up to date with our work. Within the team I made sure all the impedances are communicated well. During every sprint planing phase I would ask everyone to speak up and made sure everyone’s voice is heard.
Data Analyst
Google BigQuery. I used google BigQuery to extract the game data. I created subqueries and extracted data like “Daily Active Users” or “What are players using to play the game”. I created a script that would help us differentiate between bots and actual users.
Grafana Tool. I used Grafana and excel to analyze the extracted data. I created visualizations for different metrics that helped the team to understand the problem better.
Game Metrics. I extracted data and used it to calculate various metrics like retention rate, churn rate, Life-time value of customer and others.
Challenges
Constant Updates
Gold Mania was a live game and had constant updates that contained new features. It was difficult to work with various versions of the game.
To solve the problem, the team decided to work on single version of the game and keep in touch with client to check if there are any future major updates that could be incorporated in our design.
No Programmer
One of the major problem we faced was that of lack of programmer in our team. This made our team a little disoriented as we did not have any functional prototype to deliver to the client.
To overcome this situation, we arranged a meeting with our client and informed about our skillsets. We negotiated with the client for an interactive digital prototype. We used Figma tool to create digital prototype.
