How We Made a Game Design Checklist for AAA GaaS

In this article, I want to share my experience making a checklist for World of Tanks PC in Wargaming and explain why you as a Game Designer or your team need to do a similar initiative.

Let’s start with a small glossary:

• AAA (Triple A) is a classification of video games produced by major publishers. As a rule, these games have high quality and a large budget. For example, I can name League of Legends, The Witcher 3, or Fortnite.
• GaaS (Games-as-a-Service), live game, or live service game is a business model to monetize video games after their release. This model implies the regular delivery of new game content (including events and systems). Examples, are Genshin Impact, Dying Light 2, or PUBG.
• Pre-production in game development is a planning phase where the main focus is on creating feature concepts, making documentation, and all necessary preparations for the next phase.

Intro

In my company, we always review existing processes and make optimization (save time and improve quality) if needed. The main task was to improve the quality of the pre-production phase on the designer’s part. The fewer mistakes in the initial phase, the better for further work on the feature.

Why did we need a checklist?

Do you know what it means if the game is 13 years old? Legacy, big legacy. By legacy I mean technical limitations and existing game systems and rules. You can’t easily get rid of them (even if you want). Now you understand what means to work with GaaS.

In a large game company, people come and go, so their knowledge. Our memory is cool but don’t rely on it too much. Not to miss any dependency (each mistake costs a lot, and by the way we are making AAA) it is better to have one place to store them. The checklist was the best solution.

Instruments we used

For writing down we had Confluence, but each word processor as Google Docs or Notion is cool.

MS Teams for online meetings and chatting since our team was distributed.

Best practices we tried

Gather a good team

From experience, I will say that 3 to 6 people is the ideal number for working together.

Our team consisted of volunteers, no one was forced, so everyone was interested in working on this initiative.

One responsible for a team

If all are responsible, then no one is. Read more about the RACI matrix methodology.

Thanks, Angelina Mikhaevich for responsible ownership of this initiative.

Schedule deadlines

Otherwise, we would do this task endlessly. Deadlines must be specific and understandable. And, of course, the whole team must be aware of it. For example, we should describe 10 dependencies by next Friday.

Divide and rule

Choose a field you are good at and do research. Each was responsible for the parts where they had the most expertise.

In some cases, we decided to do vise-versa and take something unknown to us to study, because we have more motivation than on usual work days.

Do a lot of brainstorming

Discussing one issue from different sides and points of view will help to come to a good solution. For making the best brainstorming I recommend reading the description of technique from BABOK v3.

Make cross review

Errors and typos are possible and this is normal, but you need to catch them. A fresh look at done work can help to find imperfections.

Thanks, Julia Shturich and Наталия Грабова for useful feedback.

Regular health check

Sometimes it’s more effective to get together for 5 minutes and talk through problems and blockers out loud than in a long correspondence via chat.

Example

Well, I decided to make a clearer example and have chosen GaaS Genshin Impact (a pretty popular game).

How to use the checklist

For each feature, we copy this document and go through each point. Write it down as an action item if something is to be done or checked. For example, go to the legal team to ask about unicorn horns.

For really small features you can skip going through the checklist. But try not to do this to avoid missing something.

Conclusion

As a result, we presented our checklist to the design team, processed the received feedback, and integrated the checklist into our daily work.

P.S. Thanks for reading my first article ever! I hope you’ve found something particularly useful for you.