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Xavier Guardiola (Data Science Director, King)
Location: Room 2016, West Hall
Date: Monday, March 20
Time: 10:50 am - 11:50 am
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass
Topic: Free-to-Play
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: Video
Audience Level: All
Jan Wedekind, VP of Central Insights, and Xavier Guardiola, Director of Data Science, will introduce what King has learned about content in Candy Crush Saga after 10 years and shipping over 10,000 levels.
The presentation will show how data and metrics can help to characterize levels in terms of difficulty, engagement or skill, for example. They will also show the limitations of standard metrics when it comes to identify engaging levels and how King embraced an academic collaboration with physicists that led to the development of a statistical player progression model that overcome those limitations.
Finally, there will be some discussion around the challenges and opportunities of collaboration between data scientists and level designers.
Attendees will learn about a better way to understand player engagement and difficulty in games with a long progression that can be divided into levels of any kind and how King applies this knowledge to improve Candy Crush Saga. Attendees can also see how seemingly unrelated fields of science (e.g. physics) can uncover tremendous value when applied with fresh eyes to the "magic" of games.
This is for level designers, game designers, and data scientists.