Player Centric Milestones

Read Time: 6 Minutes

We’ve got a guest author today! Jonathan Zabel recently wrote a great piece on milestones in game dev, and I wanted to share it with our distro. Jonathan gave us permission to publish this, so many thanks to him! Let’s get into it.

Story Time, Part 1

Back in 2018, I had just joined a 60 person team making a 4X game (you know, those intense strategy games with base building, combat and a huge world map).

When we talked to the execs funding us, we confidently told them we were in Production heading towards Soft Launch in a year.  But if you looked at our process, it was a mess.  We spent three hours every night trapped in a conference room reviewing everything in the build with the Game Director down to the smallest detail. (And of course there were many hours spent filing JIRA tickets the next day to make sure not a single piece of feedback was missed!)

As weeks turned into months, there was more stuff going into the game, but the game wasn’t getting better.  The more frustrated the Game Director got that we couldn’t understand his vision, the more low-level and tactical the direction became.  He stopped trusting the team.

We were losing the forest for the trees.  We were teaching the team to be helpless, to stay in their lane and do exactly what they were told.  Something had to be done or our launch would be a flop.

So I asked the Game Director one day, “What would happen if you took all the energy you’re currently spending telling the team what stuff to build, and instead spent it on describing the player experience you want to create in as much detail as possible?”  He was intensely skeptical, but what we were doing was not working and that was my opening.

And then everything started to get better.

Milestone Basics

What’s a milestone, anyway?

A milestone is a collection of goals that have more impact when delivered together.

Typically, milestones have three components:

• The player experience you’re looking to create

• Deadline

• Consequences (if either the experience or deadline is missed)

Why are milestones useful?

Milestones allow the team and stakeholders to agree on a desired player experience that will be delivered at a specific time.

How are milestones typically used?

Milestones get a bad rap with teams because they tend to be externally imposed (by your studio or publisher) and don’t help the team focus on a desired player experience.  I’ll briefly describe the two most common uses.

Typical Use #1: Game Phases

Most publishers, studios and teams use a development framework (game phases).  They are, very roughly:

Let’s expand on Pre-Production as an example:

Game phases might not be that inspiring to the team, but they do serve a useful purpose as a validation funnel.  Since your team’s monthly cost goes up the more people you have, frontloading risky ideas early in development allows the team to stay small and experiment for longer without as much ship pressure.

Typical Use #2: Rhythm of Business

If you haven't signed with a publisher or secured funding yet, “we need X features by Y date when we pitch our game to Microsoft” or “Apple said they’d give us free marketing if we deliver X feature by Y date” are common situations milestones are externally imposed on the team.

If you’ve signed a deal with a publisher, specific milestones and deliverables tend to be written into your contract.

Player-Centric Milestones

What are player-centric milestones?

Here are two hypothetical milestones for a fighting game prototype with equal scope:

1. Deliver two characters, three menus, five weapons and a small map in April

2. In April, players can pursue mastery in a 1v1 fantasy duel that challenges their wits as much as their reflexes.

The first milestone might seem impressive in terms of how much stuff your team is making, but it’s hard to know what all that stuff is for.  This type of milestone is why your Game Director might be saying the team “doesn’t get it” and the team might retort that “the vision keeps changing.”

The second milestone talks about:

• How you want the player to behave (play the game a lot)

• What motivates them to behave that way (they want a feeling of mastery)

• What experience you’re delivering to satisfy that motivation (a deeper strategic metagame than other fighting games)

How do I set player-centric milestones?

Step #1: Target Player

Before you can set player-centric milestones, you need to answer the question: “Who’s our target player for this game?”

The clearer a picture you have of your target player, what they enjoy and what their current frustrations are, the more effective your milestones will be.

Step #2: Player Behavior

The first question you’ll answer is: “After playing this milestone, how will players behave?”

There tend to be four major behaviors you’re looking to drive:

• Engagement (players play the game for the long time and/or play multiple times a day)

• Retention (players come back and play every day, for months or even years)

• Reach (players tell their friends about the game and convince them to start playing or come back to the game)

• Revenue (players spend money on the game)

If you’re setting a milestone that targets multiple behaviors, it’s a good time to stop and ask whether you’re taking on too much at once.

Step #3: Player Motivation

The next question is: “What will motivate players to behave this way?”

Think of motivations as a prioritization tool.  If you know how you want players to behave, motivations will help you understand where to focus your efforts in order to make them behave that way.

A simple example:

• If you want players to play the game a lot

• And you know your target player is motivated by mastery

• Then you’re going to spend most of your energy making core combat deeper (instead of on worldbuilding & narrative, social systems like guilds, etc.)

I’ve included a sample player motivation model from Quantic Foundry to get you started.

Step #4: Player Experience

The last question is: “What will players experience that serves that motivation?”

I recommend a technique called Player Journey Mapping because it allows you to draw a direct connection between what you’d like players to experience (“pursue mastery in a 1v1 fantasy duel”) and all the stuff you need to build (“two characters, three menus, five weapons and a small map”).

This is what you’ll show to stakeholders who ask you “OK, but what’s the strategy here?” and to team members who ask “yeah, but what do we actually need to make?”

Example

Let’s revisit my fighting game prototype and bring it all together.

Story Time, Part 2

After asking the Game Director to talk about the player experience he wanted instead of the stuff he wanted added to the build, he mentioned that in the next six months:

• First Time Player Experience.  He wanted new players to keep playing past the first few days because they felt like they were becoming more powerful, mastering the core game mechanics and were curious about the story.

• Mid-Game Progression.  He wanted players who had been playing a few weeks to keep playing and not get bored because they were getting constant upgrades to their base and fighting other players for the first time.

• End-Game Guild PvP.  He wanted hardcore end-game players to play a massive amount on the weekends because of the powerful upgrade resources they could obtain by battling other guilds in contested territory.

These milestones weren’t about adding a new combat unit, rebalancing the crafting economy or changing the progression unlock order of buildings in your base (though we did do all of that stuff).  They were about driving specific behavior for a certain type of player within our game.

Because we had this clarity, we were able to split the team into three pods, each with a separate backlog that would serve these six-month milestones.  Playtests and reviews became more focused.   It was easy to know what was important and what could wait.

It wasn’t perfect.  There were plenty of times we got caught in the weeds, or suddenly pivoted and blew up all our existing backlogs.  But at least we now knew why players would care about all the stuff we were making.

Next Steps

Take a look at the milestones on your current project.  How would you redefine them to focus more on the desired player experience?  How would your team and your stakeholders react?  I'd love to hear about your experiences and insights!

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