Spaghetti Standoff (2012)
Spaghetti Standoff is a playground game where players stand in a circle, each holding on to the ends of uncooked pasta noodles in each hand. Players then try to break other pasta bonds while keeping theirs intact, without using their hands. The last pair holding an unbroken noodle wins.
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Awards
IndieCade Official Selection 2013
My Role
I helped sponsor and ideate Spaghetti Standoff, which came out of one of our internal R&D events. The R&D department at Arkadium was in charge of fostering game ideas from all employees, and prototyping them to see if they would be suitable for production. We used web analytics from our internal game site audience to look at engagement measures and then recommended prototypes for production based on the data.
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Spaghetti Standoff was one of several physical or playground games we helped foster. We wanted to encourage employees to come up with unique game ideas by pushing them to think about physical game ideas as well as digital. We presented this game in festivals such as IndieCade and NYC's Come Out and Play.
Lessons Learned
Encouraging Physical Gameplay
Our main focus in R&D was to encourage game ideas from everyone in the company. However, we wanted to also expand employees' vocabulary of games by hosting weekly board game nights and participation in local game festivals. Doing so allowed idea creation to become more varied, and these activities helped foster team-building and an influx of ideas from employees. It also allowed for our company profile to grow within the local game development community and to increase our participation in local events.
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Creating Asset Libraries
I also focused on creating asset libraries for the company. This helped in the creation of prototypes, production and internal game jams. Before that, there was no centralized location for pre-existing animations and code snippets. Developers and artists were recreating similar features over and over again. The asset libraries allowed people to grab commonly used graphical, UI or game elements to either adjust or use directly in their projects.
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ArkU: Continuing Education
Another aspect of R&D that I focused on was internal continuing education. We would poll interests on various topics and host lunch hour presentations that were open to everyone. We also inquired about contributions from employees so that everyone could learn more about different roles and department goals.
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