Social gaming tournament

DrunkenFall is the name of One Eye Production’s social gaming events taking place in public bars. DrunkenFall brings together people from all across the globe, uniting them under one tournament of the game TowerFall. One Eye Productions produces the Twitch stream and have made own modifications to the game in order for it to directly communicate with One Eye Productions own tournament engine. The goal for One Eye Productions has been to bring the party to the crowd, where we want to engage both players and an audience no matter where and if it’s physical or digital. A side-effect has been that it gives the players a sense of fame, to be able to sit in the spotlight for just a brief time and be part of something larger.

ClientOne Eye ProductionsTime period2013 - PresentIndustryE-sportServicesCo-founder, Producer, Lead UX Design, UI Designer, Interaction Designer, Graphics Designer, Motion Designer

2019-12-14|Magnus UleniusBy Magnus Ulenius|11 Minutes

How it started

It's hard to say exactly when this project started. It's been a side project of mine since 2013 but really hit big in 2016 when we got in contact with professional casters and started streaming, then again in 2018 when we got a collaboration with the E-sports bar Kappa Bar in Stockholm.

The project includes everything from concept development, business, production, development and design. The board consists of six individuals with their own roles, front-end engineer, back-end engineer (also co-founder), event manager, marketing, hardware and myself with design, production and commentary.

Our target audience concists of two types, the players and the audience. Where they players are the attendees at the events and the audience are both attendees and viewers on twitch.

The main problem One Eye Production is working to solve is the fact that ever since gaming became mainstream in the information age, it mostly takes place at home by your own computer without the social interaction. The only exception is if you are gaming online and are talking to your friends over Discord or have any other sort of voice communication. Earlier you had to sit down in the same room as your friends and either do split screen, pass the controller or in any other way manage how you play the game.

With the emerge of the open source console OUYA, TowerFall was probably the single decent game released (and later ported to other consoles). This game is perfect for the old school type of social gaming and thus we had a foundation.

Tournament Engine

Our tournament engine started out as pen and paper. With the knowledge we had about both design and development, a digitization was close at hand. The first iterations translated the setup we had with pen and paper on order to figure out who is going to play against who.

The complexity of this setup soon started to emerge, where we figured that we might be one of the pioneers in building a competative platform where 4 players go against eachother simultaneously. At the time of writing the engine can handle qualification rounds (to earn a spot in the actual tournament brackets), the tournament brackets with 3 matches, one second chance with the second best players from the three previous along with the best third, and the final. Since the tournaments are in a open bar setting where people may come and go as they please, the engine even supports this scenario throughout the whole evening.

The improvements on the engine are made in small iterations and we are currently in the position where we can start to utilize the insights about our audiences properly and spend some time on UX improvements.

The style of the UI is dark, modern and focuses on gaming. The colors are inspired by the game and other products gamers are currently using (like Discord). The platform is a real-time web app with websockets basically everywhere in order for the user to not have to refresh in order to get updated information about who gets to play the next round or any changes in the leaderboard.

I'm especially proud of the fact that we are able to communicate everything that's going on in the background in just a few screens. Everything is compact and slimmed in order not to give the players and audiences an information overload. The back-end stuff that we use as administrators does not yet follow the same guidelines though but will be adressed as soon as possible.

Iterations are made as soon as we learn something new from our users, and we try to keep an open dialog to the players in order for them to be part of the community and the actual development of the concept.

In the time of writing, One Eye Productions is a non-profit movement and does not accept payments nor have a direct business goal.

Stream assets

The Events

The events themselves are very popular and has to this day, always filled the bar to the brim with both players and audience. The players register for the tournament through our site and later gets signed in to the tournament when they arrive at the venue.

During qualification rounds, that are supposed to be as fast paced as possible and without any delays, we do not have any commentary. Instead the stream plays background music and shows who is going to play the next match, which is working really well. Since the implementation of this feature the crew don't have to go out and look for the players anymore, instead they show up at the gaming station by themselves when it's their time to play.

Player Journey

In order to gain an understanding about our player's journey during the tournament I created a (Customer) Journey Map, this helped us visualize where we had the biggest problem areas in the flow of a tournament from a players' point of perspective.

By consolidating all of the comments made during the events and conducting some user interviews, I managed to lay out the puzzle and map the progression and what the interface was lacking and at what point in time.

The map is structured in three different categories:
- Before playing
- During the match
- After you've played

The main problem areas for each are -
Before playing:
- There's a lack of information about the tournament and how the night will progress. The new players have a hard time grasping the concept.
- What's the difference between registration and sign up? The players thought that had signed up for the tournament by registering before arrival.
- What are the rules? The players don't know what the rules are for the tournament.
- Who am I playing against? Players lack the ability to check out who and the level of competition they're up against.

During:
- Lack of skill. The players feel that they are not good enough.

After they've played:
- What's my score? How did my play affect my ranking? Players are unable to look their scores and compare their performance.
- Who transitions to the next round? Players don't know what will happen next.

In order to treat some of these pain points, we started a small project called Multi Screen Support. The focus for this project was to rewrite the front-end in such a way to make it modular and be able to highlight most of the pain points before a match by introducing a leaderboard, brackets and upcoming match that is accessible by the players at all time during the tournament. This feature is yet to be evaluated but some of the results can be seen in the mockups in this case study.

Live Streaming

All of our events are streamed live through Twitch. By having professional commentary and keeping a high production value, this gives the players a sense of being part of something larger. Some of the feedback we've had highlights the fact that they feel "s*it, these guys are serious" and they get a sense of fame for a brief moment.

The stream setup is getting more and more complex as time progresses and one of my main roles have been to be in charge of the production - eg. what do we show, on what screens, how, and when. I've also made both the trailer and the stream assets we have in terms of layout and stinger transitions.

What have I learn from this project?

During this project I've really learned group dynamics. We've been lucky in the sense that we have really competent and dedicated people on our team that does everything for free, which is also one of the hardest part - keeping everything fun in order to continue going.

Looking back, we could have done with more UX earlier on in the project but on the other hand, this has all been unexplored territory. We learn as we go and I don't see this projet coming to and end anytime soon.

There are no references of how to conduct a free-for-all tournament where 4 players go against each other. This has made me think more of how to structure a point system that is easily understood, but fulfills our need to differentiate players ending up on the same score.

The complexity of running a tournament like this cannot be overlooked, nor should it be holding us back. For me it has always been a driving factor to expand and reach new people. It brings me joy to see others enjoying themselves as much as they do once they sit down in the couch, because if there's one thing we have it's definitely engaged players.

14+

Events

>200

Players engaged

2.500+

Twitch views

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