The End of the Line: New Age

Overview:

The End of the Line: New Age (EotL:NA ) started as a student project named The End of the Line as part of the Advanced Games Project (AGP) program at the University of Southern California. The AGP has students develop a game idea from pitch to demo over their Junior and Senior years, with the first year focused on preparing a pitch, and the latter focused on prototyping and creating a demo.

The Goal:

After graduating we managed to secure funding turn our demo into a full game, which became EotL:NA. We were aiming ot turn our 2.5D Visual Novel inspired demo into an Indie Gacha Game. I worked on this project from Spring 2019 till about Fall 2020.

My Role:

I was the team's Product Researcher and was responsible for researching systems and features present in other Gacha Games.

What I Learned:
This project was my first real game job out of college and it was incredibly enlightening. This job helped me realize a lot of my initial weaknesses in a relatively safe space, allowing me to improve on them in real time over the course of the project. I also got experience writing and administering a large group survey, which was enlightening for the amount of data it produced.

I also learned the danger of surveying too broadly via too many questions and free response sections, which directly influenced my survey writing for Glowing Garden and the research methods used for Miacademy.

Prospective User Survey

Overview:

This was one of my biggest and most important contributions to the project. I was tasked with surveying our prospective player base and discovering what the average gacha game players most wanted out of a new gacha game.

To this end I surveyed the subreddit /r/gachagaming: the largest gaming subreddit not focused on a specific launched gacha game.

EOTL: New Age

Pre-Production User Survey

My Role:

After contacting the mods and getting their approval for conducting this study, I created a survey with the following objectives:

Discover how players found their primary gacha game
Discover how long players have stayed with their game to determine any correlation between longevity and choices made by their primary gacha game's developers
Discover player opinions about their main gacha game's core gameplay loop

Additionally, we wanted to find general information about:

How multiple gachas conduct seasonal content and limited events
How summon systems and character 'banners' function across multiple games
What frustrations and pain points players have about these 2 specific points and what could be done to fix this.

My Impact

My survey resulted in 90 total participants and several paragraphs of free response feedback. It took me about 2 weeks to analyze on my own, but resulted in a broader understanding of the Gacha Game Genre.

Participant responses answered the first and third research goal, but weren't able to draw conclusions for the second due to the sheer variety of answers and replies.

The second crop of questions yielded more actionable results, as the findings there were directly responsible for shaping our core design and mechanics in pre production.

Gacha Game Heuristic Research Presentation

Overview:

Early in pre-production I conducted a heuristic analysis of several specific gacha games to better understand their core loops and features.

EOTL: New Age

Gacha Game Heuristic Presentation

My Role:

I Researched several gacha games over a period of 2 months to discover the following elements:

Core systems and mechanics
Seasonal events
Progression process
How "Summoning" units works and any pity features related to drop rate increasing
What 'main quest' story and side content looks like

The above is the first example presentation I made, focused on Granblue Fantasy.

My Impact:

My findings were important for defining our scope. My research showed the staple elements of the gacha genre and helped us find the features to incorporate into our gacha game, directly shaping our core game loop.