Age of Empires II: DE (AoE) is a real-time strategy (RTS) game developed by Forgotten Empires and published by Xbox Game Studios. The game was released in November 2019 and is a remastered version of the original game, Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, which was released in 1999.
The game features over 40 civilizations (civs)to choose from; the player can choose to play with Italians or Aztecs, Malians or Hindustanis, each civilization with their unique units, technologies, and optimal strategies and weaknesses.
The most common game mode is online 1v1 ranked play: the player picks a civ, and is matched with another player online who is of equal skill level.
Problem & Opportunity
AoE is a very complex game. The amount of civs and units makes decision-making very difficult, especially when players are under pressure often involved when facing human players in a competitive situation.
The subreddit for Age of Empires 2 is an active online forum where every week tens of new players come to the community with questions about the game and asking for advice for certain situations. We analyzed recent such Reddit messages and learned that most requests for advice fall under this format:
What should I do with civ A when playing on map B against civ C who is using strategy D?
Answering this question efficiently and reliably would solve over 70% of the problems people seek advice for from the Reddit community.
Solution
We built an online "game coach" application that in real-time answers the above question.
Target Audience
Our solution is aimed at new and low-ranked players who are interested in getting better at the game.
"I am interested in anything that helps this community, which is also why I am happy to help answer any questions that you had" - Anonymous Redditor
Team & My Role
In this project, my key responsibilities are as follows:
- Market and user research; I'm surveying and interviewing AoE players to understand how we could provide the most value
- Feature mapping; based on user research and the team's capabilities, I'm responsible for conceptualizing the feature set and roadmap for the product
- Software development support; as the project is not a full-time assignment for the development team, it is somewhat short-handed. I'm mainly contributing in building the application's backend and database
- Promotion and user community management; to fuel the app's development and adoption, I'm working with various influencers in the AoE gaming community and building a circle of excited beta testers and gathering feedback from them
Additionally, I built an admin application for the application. The admin app is used to manage the application's data which is, in turn, consumed by the customer-facing application. The admin app is a full-stack JavaScript application; backend is built with Node.js, frontend with React, and MongoDB was used for managing the data.
Results & Impact
We hope to help current and future Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition players to overcome the complexity of the game and help them become a happy member of this wonderful community!
Learnings
"Let a thousand flowers blossom." The first envisioned use-case might not be the only one, so you can't fall in love with it. Keeping one's eyes open on how people actually use your product might lead to great discoveries!
It's really hard to reach the level of creativity that you get in face-to-face work sessions while fully online. We made the biggest leaps in the project while together with the team in the same room.
Projects feel so much more fulfilling when working on a topic that excites you. I found myself spending most of my waking hours thinking of this project, because I was really into the game when we started.
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