Co-creating with users leads to positive product management outcomes.

Anthony Batt — Sun, 07 May 2023 20:07:22 +0000

No matter how much AI technology is provided to product and development teams, the hard truth remains: users still need to love and want to pay for what you're making.

An effective way to develop a product is to collaborate with the right group of early users in co-creating the product. WVS is an excellent example of this, and we used it to start this process. For several months, we have been in a private whitelist with a cohort of users who intend to use WVS to speed up their team's velocity in creating projects with game engines like Epic's Unreal Engine and Unity.

We recognize that game development teams use various tools, but we aim to push the limits of what is achievable here. Therefore, we chose to co-create WVS with game development teams. We shared Slack or Discord channels and regularly showed them the product to get their feedback on it. We concluded that it was ready to be used by a broader user set only when the original alpha group was immensely satisfied with the product. This approach is highly recommended for early product development teams to build successful products.

It is crucial that every engineer, product manager, and designer crafting the product listens to users and iterates quickly by releasing features that users can test. Obtaining real-world data from users is pivotal to understanding how the product feature is being used. Ensuring that the entire team understands what is or isn't working is critical to advancing product development.

I have found that using this pattern over decades of creating consumer digital media products and enterprise SaaS products has led to successful outcomes.

I believe that obtaining feedback from the right users in the early stages of product development is crucial. My experience has taught me and my teams that involving a select group of users in the co-creation process is an efficient way to ensure that the product is tailored to their needs and solves narrow problems, while also allowing the product to scale broadly to solve additional requirements. We have found that it is essential to work with a cohort of users that have a genuine interest in the product and are willing to provide constructive feedback.

I recommend that early product development teams thoroughly consider the benefits of involving co-creation with a select group of users to develop successful products. In my experience, building products with a lot of user empathy aligns product teams with users' product use. So, listening to user feedback, iterating quickly, and obtaining real-world data are all critical components of this process. By following this pattern, we believe that teams can develop products that not only meet user needs but also exceed expectations.

Simplify Your Unity Game Development with WVS

Anthony Batt — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 00:55:00 +0000

Get all the tools and features you need to successfully deploy your game to mobile phones and VR headsets, including support for multiple platforms, automated builds, and collaboration features. Plus, with robust security controls and reliable support from people that make games. So you can focus on what matters most: creating a great game.

I found deploying a Unity game to mobile phones or VR headsets can be a challenging process, especially if you are working with a large team and need to manage multiple builds and configurations. I wanted a game dev centric devops solution which includes powerful version control features from Git, can help streamline deploying process for the whole team and make it easier to release updates and new versions of your game, while also facilitating collaboration among team members. I was lucky to be apart of Wevr a talented game dev team and devops engineers that wanted to make this devops platform we call WVS.

One of the key features of WVS for Unity game deployment is support for a variety of deployment targets. This can include mobile phones (iOS, Android) as well as VR headsets (Oculus, HTC Vive). WVS also allows you to create platform-specific build configurations and settings to ensure that your game is optimized for each target platform. And, to make the process even easier, WVS has all of these configuration features set up and ready for use, or can be customized to fit your specific needs.

WVS extends Git’s powerful version control system that is widely used in software development, and it is an essential tool for game development as well. With WVS, you can take advantage of Git's capabilities in a cloud-hosted environment, allowing you to track changes to your code and assets, revert to previous versions if needed, and collaborate with other team members in real time. WVS's tight integration with Git allows game teams to create separate dev branches for different levels or fixes, and easily merge these changes back into the main branch when they are ready. This can be especially useful when working on a large, complex game with multiple remote developers and a high rate of change. WVS has addressed the issues game devs have had with Git in the past: 1) We have optimized LFS to deal with large binary files efficiently, and 2) we have an easy to use GUI for non-technical team members (while devs familiar with Git can continue to use your favorite Git client). WVS via Git provides code review features, which can help ensure the quality and consistency of your codebase. Overall, WVS's cloud-hosted Git is an essential tool for game development that can help your team work more efficiently and effectively.

Another important feature for Unity game deployment is the ability to create cloud testing and staging environments. This can allow you to test and debug new features and changes before they are deployed to production, ensuring that your game is of the highest quality. WVS has automation framework called Flows that enables game developers to use preconfigured Flows to automatically run Unity game builds on WVS cloud machines and push completed builds directly to the teams mobile phones or VR headsets.

Team collaboration is key when working on a Unity game with a remote team, and WVS can help facilitate this process. WVS has features such as automation, deployment, and code review to allow team members to work together effectively. The team can leverage a full featured issue tracker and wiki to communicate priorities or asset reviews. This can be especially useful for the art team, producers, and developers to share and review code, assets and tasks. WVS increases team velocity by being a purpose built game-engine development devops platform.

Finally, WVS provides robust security controls to protect your code and resources from unauthorized access and data breaches. And WVS has reliable and responsive support to help you resolve any issues or questions you may have during the deployment process.

Overall, WVS can automate and greatly simplify the process of deploying a Unity game to mobile phones or VR headsets, and provide a range of tools and features to help ensure the success of your game, while also making it easy for the whole team to collaborate and work together effectively.

We are looking for 20 game development teams that have a project ready for production to join our journey to modernize cloud game production. If you are interested please join and hit me up on twitter @djabatt!

DEV Community: Anthony Batt

Co-creating with users leads to positive product management outcomes.

Simplify Your Unity Game Development with WVS