Hi,
Just wondering if there’s some kind of list of indie game devs in Taiwan?
This summer, I will quit my job and plan on building out my portfolio by doing some probono UX research work. Figured small dev teams would benefit the most from this kind of service. I know there’s a single game conference every year, not sure if there are others? I’m located in the Taipei area but I can do the work remote no problem so can be any studio Taiwan wide.
Thanks in advance
I like this company’s games the most. They have a bunch of early music/rhythm based games. I first learned of this company through their Mandora game where players would have to pluck a radish out of the ground at the moment it’s ripe.
It’s a really old game and I don’t think they are updating it anymore.
Since then they’ve came out with a Clash-Royale-like game called Soul of Eden, which I really enjoyed. It’s actually fairly popular, there are many Japanese and Korean players. There are also English speaking youtubers playing the game.
They have an upcoming RPG game featuring Mandora radishes. I’ve been waiting for its release for almost a year now.
What type of games do you want to work on, web/html5 or more desktop focused like Unity or Unreal Engine?
Another company would be Fourdesire
It primarily makes games that encourages users to do something. For example, there is a game that encourages user to walk, and by walking you can explore new planets. There is a game that encourages player to record expenses, and grows a city when you do so. There is another game that reminds players to keep being hydrated, and grow cute plants in game.
Another game company that I really like is CGCG (創遊遊戲).
They made the cross platform Liāu Thiam-ting game, or The Legend of Tianding in English, that’s available on nintendo Switch, Steam, and Xbox.
There is also Red Candle, that primarily makes scary adventure games that usually has a bit of historical and social commentary woven into their games.
There are events happening often, IGDShare for example is happening again on the 27th of November
IGDShare also has a quite active Discord server.
Also there is this group which is quite active and shares a lot of events happening also in taipei
不正經獨立遊戲冒險者增肥聚會 | Facebook including the ones called 《不正經獨立遊戲冒險者增肥聚會》
Taipei Game Show is happening at the begining of February again, expect many international teams to come in for it too https://tgs.tca.org.tw/
Most of the events though happen mainly in Mandarin, but you can always meet people who also speak English there.
The 不正經獨立遊戲冒險者增肥聚會 people are actually quite friendly and you can meet a lot of devs and wannabes.
If you are looking at stablished companies and want to try for some internships, Neon Doctrine is an international+local team based in Taipei and I know they do hire juniors from time to time.
https://www.neondoctrine.com/
Hi it doesn’t matter to me because I’m not a designer I’m a UX researcher. So at first I’ll be providing heuristic evaluation, expert play tests, etc focused on human factors.
Great! Thanks for this! It’s very useful
I think this will be a great user research project! There’s so many factors involved in ar type games like this so there’s a lot of opportunity to run different types of studies!
Wow great that’s perfect!! I’ll send them a message
Can I ask, this “heuristic evaluation, expert play tests” are things that you’d play and give yourself? Or are you talking about doing testing rounds with new players and then do the evaluation based on your observations of their playing experiences?
I thought the new trend is to use reinforcement learning models to do testing for you.
They’re supposed to be done based on observing recruited samples and following hypothesis testing. But I’m on a limited budget and this type of research is difficult without resources. So in the beginning I will be performing the Playtests myself following heuristic evaluation, carefully recording myself playtesting. I will also include some friends and family playtesting and then write up a report providing my insights and recomendations based on these observations. I realize this is less valuable than thorough testing using appropriate sampling, prototyping, running longitudinal diary studies, eye tracking data, etc.
My techniques will change depending on the needs of each game and the intention of their design.
I see!
Well, in my experience, indie game devs don’t have any UX designer on their team, unless it’s like tiny teams doing something new in terms of UX, or bigger companies like EA, Ubisoft, etc there might be UX researchers doing similar things to what you mentioned.
In most cases the UX Designer is the Game Designer, but that comes with its own set of knowledge and “artistic” intent. Sometimes the one doing some UX design is the UI designer. And then if they hire a QA company that gives them feedback. But that’s about it.
Most of the UX research I know in smaller dev teams is done just through user testing and player feedback. Even experienced game designers fail to correctly guess player experience.
With all that said, I think there is still value on a proper UX research when making even smaller games, but then as a external non-gamedesigner coming into the UX design of a game, you will have to fight the game directors a lot, and try to understand what is it they want to do (and hope it’s not only just “nostalgia” that drives them).
The Taipei Games Show should be in February. A lot of indie devs show up too.
This is a constant struggle even for non videogame companies and at huge studios/companies.
Also my job isn’t Design, it’s human factors. A big misconception is that UX research is synonymous with UX design, but actually they’re two seperate skills/jobs that often get rolled together (resulting in either poor design or poor research).
What I’m offering isn’t design, but user insight based on psychological and social science research techniques.
QA Teams are focused on finding bugs or fixing broken aspects of the system. They often use dedicated qa testers. For user research you want data directly from representational samples.
But I realize small teams often don’t have any UX. That’s why I’d like to offer probono work for small indie devs where I can provide them with value while building a portfolio I can later use to either get a full time gig as a dedicated UX researcher at a big company, or to move into independent consulting/freelancing
Ha, thanks for the shoutout. There’s me (Imperium42 who made Throne of Lies) and also PT Farm (who made Pokerrrr 2 and… who now owns Throne of Lies!).
@dylanh724 , would you like to tell us more about Throne of Lies? Just watched the preview, looks amazing. How long did it take to make? In Unity did you start from scratch, or do these sort of RPGs have a sort of template or starter project or some such? How long does it take to set up the back end for a such a game?
I work a lot on codepen, and like designing UIs. Use a lot of CSS. Not exactly Gamedev, but there is some overlap.
I started a browser game called Ringlordz of Saturn… but that’s only putzing around with JS. Might be tedious for you, OP.
I also wanted to develop a blitz chess browser game, where the winnings from each match go to a charity of the winner’s choice.
All of it would be open source, and likely in the browser, so others could easily fork the project.
Following this thread for fun.