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Real Flight Simulator

INTRODUCTION

Real Flight Simulator is an advanced mobile flight simulator for Android and iOS.

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Its aim is to have a balance between realism and accessibility for the user, offering the best experience of the aviation world in the palm of your hands.

 

I'm having the pleasure and the privilege of working in this game and omitted a lot of other tasks I do for brevity reasons.

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PROJECT DETAILS

  • Unity for testing features and implementing new ones.

  • Level Design for Events

  • Game Design of new game system.

  • Research & Analysis for features to implement. 

  • Creation of Game Design Documents.

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My roles & on the project

For RFS, I had the pleasure of working as a Game Designer and QA Tester! This is a glimpse of my typical tasks of in RFS:

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As a Designer - Typical tasks:

  • Research: as we worked on a complex aviation system, the research had to be accurate before going to a logical phase of design. Before starting to draft a new feature for the game, a pivotal point of creating a new design for RFS is always gathering as much info as we can. 

  • Logical phase: when we feel confident of the info gathered we start putting down all the things we need for the design:

    • Goals: what I want to do, why and how.​

    • Elements: what do I have at my disposal to reach my goal?

    • Questions: questions coming up during the logical session.

    • Ideas: all the ideas coming up during a session

    • Problems & Limitation: possible problems and limitations of the design of the feature. 

  • Kick-off: presentation of the design to the team, with goals and a presentation powerpoint like.

  • Gathering Feedback: all feedbacks are collected and implemented to the feature.

  • Refinement: another presentation with feedback implemented!

  • Iteration: Iterate with designers and programmers to resolve any problems popping up during the implementation.

  • Launch: the feature is public and the players are happy! But we still need to gather their feedback to implement them after, if any.

Notable mentions:

  • Level designer: level design for the entire season of special events for every weekend of the year.

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As a QA Tester - Typical tasks:

  • Creation of Test Cases: after a feature is soon to be implemented, in QA we start to create a checklist to test and stress the new feature in any way, communicating with design and programmers to create a robust Test Case! With new tests and regressions tests.

  • Testing of Production builds and Test builds: for Test builds we test everything about new implementations in the game with the help of built-in tools. For Production builds, we have a separate checklist with many regression tests to ensure that the game is ready for the public. 

  • Routine checks on airports: one of my main tasks was to check all the new airports created by the players. This is crucial as we need to release bundles of new airport content each week!

  • Creation of  Google Sheets files: To ease the process of checks, I've created sheet files with tabs to keep track of Jira tickets, that update regularly synchronizing with RFS board on Jira.

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Examples of some key features created for RFS

New Event System

The new event system is the biggest feature I wrote for RFS, in a few words is:

  • A seasonal system that offers special flights around the world to do every weekend.

  • ​Players during the even flights have a Flights Points bonus multiplier, to encourage them to participate in the event instead of joining a normal multiplayer server.​

  • Players are also rewarded with a new currency called merits upon finishing a flight event, the latter is used to unlock special 3D models of aircraft and special 3D badges. 

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  • 3D models and badges can be equipped on their profile pages 

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  • The Event System also introduced the Event Hub, a new menu created to enclose in a single page all the information needed for the player, such as time of unlocking of the new event, description of the event, status of the merits count collected during the season, and rewards unlocked.​

Improvements from the old Event System and results of the new System

The old event system had some inconveniences:

  • Players needed to rely heavily on social media to know when the next event will happen.

  • Players needed to set the event manually inside the game, as there was no automatic system to set the flight plan for them.

  • There were no incentives for doing events for a more casual player, as the old events only rewarded points for veteran players.

  • The system needed to be maintained each week to upload the event to the game.

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New improvements:

  • We created an automatic system that the player can use to set instantly the event flight plan with only one tap.

  • Casual and Hardcore players are rewarded respectively with prizes and points.

  • The new event hub tells precisely the player when the new event will unlock, also on the main menu a text appears telling you when the events will unlock.

  • The new system is more automatic, as we need only to set it up one time and then the in-game logic executes all the events of the season every weekend. 

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Result:

  • Players think that events are not just a trivial thing of the game anymore, as the new events add more personalization options for them and community gatherings!

  • We constantly have more players at each event than in the old system, even during the closing season days.

  • Also, they think it's more fun :)! â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹â€‹

New Aircraft menu selection

The old Aircraft selection had to be changed

​The new aircraft menu improves on what the old menu was missing:

  • No filters to search immediately ​for the desired aircraft.

  • No thumbnails to quickly have a preview of an aircraft (especially if you don't know them).

    • Same thing for the liveries.​​​​​​​​​​​​​

  • Lots of aircraft to scroll, they are 30-plus aircraft!

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Improvements

  • The new menu has a scrollable list with thumbnails so that the user can have a quick glance at the aircraft (and liveries) before choosing it.

  • Added 3 categories: Aircraft, Liveries, and failures.

  • New filters were added to group aircraft by their types. 

  • Favorite star system added: it gives the possibility for the player to assign an aircraft with a star to mark it as a favorite. Favorite aircraft are grouped in a favorite filter tab. This was to solve the problem of scrolling a lot to find your favorite aircraft. 

  • new stats grid: the old stats were unreliable due to their dynamic nature, the new stats show the basic and more understandable statistics of the aircraft.

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Improvements

  • the new feature was well received by the community, calling it a professional new menu, much more convenient to use than the old one.

  • They also requested more filters!

Conclusion

I'm very grateful of working in this project, as I'm still learning and the company trusts me in doing very impacting tasks for the game.

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Also thank to you that you have reached the conclusion! With this button you can check other projects thank you!

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