2025-group-11a
Skateholders
The stakeholders of the Snake Game can be analyzed in layers using the onion model to ensure that all key needs are fully considered.
Core Layer: Direct Stakeholders
These are individuals directly involved in the game’s development and experience:
- Players 🎮 – Require a smooth gaming experience, intuitive controls, and engaging gameplay.
- Developers 👨💻 – Responsible for programming and optimizing the game to ensure stable performance.
- Designers 🎨 – Focus on UI/UX and game flow to create an intuitive and visually appealing interface.
- Testers 🛠 – Ensure the game runs stably on different devices and resolve potential issues.
Middle Layer: Indirect Stakeholders
These stakeholders support or influence the game without being directly involved in its creation:
- Game Operators 🕹 (e.g., Steam, Google Play) – Handle game distribution, promotion, and maintenance, ensuring market performance, privacy compliance, and player feedback.
- Guardians 👨👩👧👦 – Concerned about the gaming behavior of minors, expecting parental controls and anti-addiction mechanisms.
- Advertisers 📢 – Focus on precise ad delivery while ensuring ads do not disrupt the user experience.
Outer Layer: External Influencers
These stakeholders shape the game’s market presence and compliance:
- Regulators ⚖ – Ensure compliance with data privacy, age rating, and advertising policies.
- Competitors 🏆 – Drive market competition, encouraging continuous optimization and innovation.
- Game Community 🌍 – Includes streamers, forum users, and influencers, who provide feedback and increase game awareness through social engagement.
Conclusion
This stakeholder analysis helps the development team accurately identify needs, optimize game design, and improve market competitiveness. By considering all stakeholder groups, the game can meet player expectations while achieving sustainable market growth.
Image 1: Skateholders of our Snake game
Epics and User Stories
📌 Epic 1: Core Gameplay Optimization
- As a player, I want to control the snake using touch or keyboard so that I can play easily.
- As a player, I want the game speed to increase as the snake gets longer to enhance the challenge.
- As a player, I want animations and sound effects when the snake crashes to improve my experience.
🎨 Epic 2: Visual and Sound Enhancements
- As a player, I want to adjust the game’s background color to reduce eye strain.
- As a player, I want special sound effects when eating food to enhance immersion.
🏆 Epic 3: Map Mode Optimization
- As a player, I want different map modes, such as swamp, desert, and teleportation, each with unique characteristics, so that I can experience varied gameplay.
- As a player, I want the swamp mode to have slow movement areas, the desert mode to have occasional sandstorms, and the teleportation mode to feature portals for quick repositioning to enhance the challenge.
⚙ Epic 4: Personalization and Accessibility Settings
- As a player, I want to customize the snake’s color so that I can clearly distinguish it from the background and food.
- As a player, I want to adjust the game difficulty to match different challenge levels.
🕹 Epic 5: Multi-Mode Support
- As a player, I want to choose endless mode to challenge my highest score.
- As a player, I want a timed mode where I can achieve the highest score within a limited time.
🔗 Epic 6: Multi-Device Compatibility and Cloud Save
- As a player, I want my game progress to be automatically saved in the cloud so that I don’t lose data when switching devices.
- As a player, I want to sync my game data between mobile and PC so that I can continue playing anytime, anywhere.
Reflection
During the process of defining epics and user stories for our Snake Game, our team gained valuable insights into requirement engineering and product planning. Here are the key lessons learned:
- How to Define a Clear User Story?
We learned that a well-defined user story should follow the As a [user], I want to [goal] so that [reason] format. This structure helped us ensure clarity and user-centric design. For instance, defining “As a player, I want to control the snake using touch or keyboard so that I can play easily” made it explicit who the user is, what they need, and why it matters. We also realized that breaking large epics into smaller, independent user stories improves task allocation and implementation feasibility. - How to Determine Acceptance Criteria?
Writing clear acceptance criteria was crucial to ensuring that each feature is properly implemented and tested. We followed the Given-When-Then structure to define testable outcomes. For example, for the three different map modes, we specified:- Given the player selects the swamp map, When they start the game, Then the terrain should include water hazards slowing down the snake.
- Given the player selects the desert map, When they play, Then food should appear less frequently, increasing difficulty.
- Given the player selects the teleport map, When the snake moves to a teleportation point, Then it should reappear on the opposite side of the screen.
This approach made it easier for testers and developers to validate functionality against defined requirements.
- How to Fit These Requirements into the Context of the Application?
One major challenge was ensuring that our user stories aligned with the overall game experience. We had to balance technical feasibility, gameplay mechanics, and user needs. For instance, implementing in-game reward prompts required designing an intuitive notification system to guide players when they achieve milestones. Additionally, ensuring historical gameplay records were saved properly allowed players to review their past performances and track their progress over time. Prioritizing features using MoSCoW (Must-have, Should-have, Could-have, Won’t-have) helped us focus on essential functionality first, ensuring a smooth development process.Final Thoughts
By systematically breaking down epics into user stories, setting clear acceptance criteria, and aligning requirements with the game’s objectives, we enhanced both gameplay design and development efficiency. This structured approach not only improved team collaboration but also ensured that we built a fun, accessible, and engaging Snake Game experience for all players.