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The following is a description and outline of the work done at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology developing Nation Feathers VR, a virtual reality game for learning about bird calls and songs. The goal was to develop a game which is intuitive, educational and entertaining. Furthermore, the software needed to be structured in a way that allows for feasible future expansion. This required careful data saving and retrieval. The game gives the player an opportunity to learn and apply that knowledge, all while maintaining a shorter runtime in order to reduce the total time spent in the virtual world. This is meant to prevent any discomfort to the player that may result from extended use of the VR headset.
The Infinica product suite consists of multiple individual microservice applications, mainly gathered around Infinica Process Engine which allows the execution of highly individualised process definitions. For estimating process performance, a layered queuing network approach has been applied. In the first step this required the implementation of a basic modelling framework. Subsequently the implemented framework was used to evaluate the applicability of the approach by creating two models and comparing them with actual performance measurements. Although the calculated results deviated from the expected results, analysis showed that the differences may
derive from an inaccurate model. Nevertheless the general approach seems to be appropriate for the given application as well as for microservices in general, especially when extended with advanced modelling techniques, as the analysed modelled results appear consistent.
The games industry has significantly grown over the last 30 years. Projects are getting bigger and more expensive, making it essential to plan, structure and track them more efficiently.
The growth of projects has increased the administrative workload for producers, project managers and leads, as they have to monitor and control the progress of the project in order to keep a permanent overview of the project. This is often accompanied by a lack of insight into the project and basic communication within the team. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to enhance conventional project management methods with process structures that occur frequently in game development.
This thesis initially elaborates on what project management in the game industry actually is: Here, methods are considered, especially agile methods and progress tracking prac-tices, which were created for software development and have become a standard in game development. Subsequently, an example is used to demonstrate how process management can function within the development of video games. Based on this, the ideal is depicted, which is implemented and used in a tool at the German games studio KING Art GmbH. This ideal is compared with expert interviews in order to verify its gen-eral validity in the industry.
By integrating process structures, the administrative effort can be reduced, communica-tion within game development can be simplified, while the current project status can be permanently presented. This benefits both project management and leads, as well as the entire team. Further application tests of this theory would have to be organized to check scalability and to draw comparisons to other applications.