YOGURT
Your Own Games User Research Toolset (or YOGURT for short) was a 4-month case studio/exploration project my senior year of college. During this time I explored the creation of a Games User Research (GUR) toolset, working in Unreal Engine 4. The end result was a minimal viable product toolset which could record a 2D heatmap of the players position, and a short paper walking through the case study and possible routes for further exploration.
Your Own Games User Research Toolset (or YOGURT for short) is a tool developed for the purpose of collecting player experience data, processing it, and visualizing said data in engine. At its core, it's goal is to help game developers better understand the experiences their players have in their game. YOGURT was built as an Unreal Engine 4 plugin to help game developers analyze player experience using telemetry from their game. It can be used with single or multi-player frameworks, but works best when there is a 2D or 3D space where players exist.
As a vision, YOGURT would have support for any number of custom modules to gather data and visualize it in the editor. This ranges from 2D or 3D heat-maps, event markers, storyboards, or any other kind of visualization that a developer would find useful. As a prototype, however, the current state of YOGURT provides native support for 2 dimensional heat-maps in 3-dimensional space. It also currently provides native support for binning collected data by timestamp so it can be viewed in chunks instead of all together.
By the end of these 15 weeks, I had created a first prototype/mockup of the tool in UE4, and had written a conference paper talking about the technology and how to set it up. The entire project is also listed under my Github as an open source project labelled YOGURT, as is the repository for the paper itself.
