Not long after finishing up development on the Pinball Lizard Mixed Reality experience for Microsoft's inaugural visit to GDC, I got the opportunity to revisit the game when Microsoft moved to acquire Playfab and its impressive suite of live ops tools for free-to-play games.   

Client: Microsoft

My Role: Designer/Animator

Creative Skills Applied: Game Design & Development, Augmented Reality and Mobile UI/UX Design, Motion Graphics and UI Animation, Print Collateral Design

The success of Microsoft at GDC and similar events revealed just how big an opportunity it was to tap into the game development industry. Lack of Windows Mixed Reality headset adoption and the advanced “premium” services used in the first Pinball Lizard led to limited developer adoption. Microsoft also saw an opportunity for telling a bigger, more holistic game development brand story than just cloud services and devices.

Lowering the entry point was a key to success of this new demo. While still using cutting edge features, the demo had to gracefully degrade so lower performing devices could still run the game. Ensuring that all services were also free to the developer was necessary for better adoption and brand perception. With their recent purchase of PlayFab (now Azure PlayFab), they wanted to educate and highlight how indie developers could create an always on game with a LiveOps platform out of the box.

The Microsoft brand was in parallel developing branding, messaging, and use cases while we were creating this new demo. This meant extended stakeholders from Azure, Azure PlayFab, and Microsoft brand were involved to make sure everything made a consistent launch at their second GDC appearance. In some cases, significant parts had to be reworked to gain alignment.

We created an entire customer journey’s worth of material to drive developers to download the AR enabled mobile demo from GitHub. The Pinball Lizard world was refactored into a AR and conventional 3D mobile phone context that took advantage of the device’s sensors. Game systems like a store front were built to highlight LiveOps scenarios. We also partnered with the Azure spatial team to create a beaconing “spectator mode” where people could watch what a player was doing in real time.

From their we created a vision video, landing page, and game manual to show indie developers the value of LiveOps and direct them to relevant materials and resources to learn more.

We had to rethink the entire premise of Pinball Lizard to make sense on a mobile device. We boiled down the gameplay into three distinct phases that each take advantage of AR. Users can also play in a conventional 3D mode to allow developers with older or low specs devices to still use the demo to learn about LiveOps.

Powerups were introduced for players to collect through either in-app purchases or winning from achievements.

See the live site: https://playfab.com/pinball-lizard/#/