Serious game development as an iterative user-centered agile software project

Abstract

Commissioned by the campus Office of Admissions, we have built a series of three campus tour and orientation games over the past academic year with undergraduate student project teams. Based on well-established game industry practices we followed an iterative agile process with Scrum and managed to avoid many classical pitfalls in game development. While we achieved some measure of success, in post-project analysis, it becomes obvious that our process would have benefited from the heavy emphasis of 'users' in the User-Centered Design (UCD) methods. In this position paper, we propose that the serious game development community continue to critically analyze the results from the UCD projects to benefit from its lessons, well-understood good practices, and development paradigms.