Predict the Storm: A Simulation Model to Measure the Playability before the Game Development

Design and development of multi-player network games is a complex and involved process. Apart from standard software development complexity, the game designer has to carefully think about issues like playability, user experience and scalability aspects of the game during the design phase itself. Most of the existing methodologies to determine playability of a multiplayer game with a targeted user experience level are only applied after the game is developed. This is highly undesirable as it incurs a high cost because multiple design and development cycles are involved that take time and increase development complexity. We propose a simulation technique that can be used to validate the playability of a game in terms of quality of experience of end-users prior to full game development. The simulation output can also provide some guidelines to the resource planning of the game server with respect to targeted requirements for user experience. Our goal in developing this tool is to make it generic and versatile at the same time staying reasonably true to the real game strategy so that it is useful for the game designers to quickly run a simulation to get insight about the game playability before the actual development process.