Heroes of rock: A design post mortem exploring the video game design process as it relates to player satisfaction

The player experience is the heart of a video game and it is the core concept behind what makes a video game engaging and fun. For my senior capstone project I designed, produced, and managed a video game titled Heroes of Rock. I lead an 11 person team over the duration of my senior year to create a game for Xbox Live Indie Arcade and it will be released in May 2013. In this paper I explore some of the design decisions and design problems that I experienced during the production of the game. At each of these design moments I focused on player satisfaction to come to the correct solution. To inform my understanding of player satisfaction I referenced works on psychology, video games, and gambling. For each design iteration of the game, we play tested the game to determine which mechanics satisfied players and we confirmed our results with design and psychological theory. See also: https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=1571430&q=Heroes+Of+Rock&facet_setname_s=%22ir_eae%22