HOW TO CREATE
A GAME IN PLAYOFF
PLAYOFF

PLAYOFF
WHY SHOULD I USE PLAYOFF?
Playoff is a powerful rules engine that can be easily integrated via SDK
and API into every existing system as a gamification layer.
It takes care of all the hard stuff like tracking scores, team structures,
player progress and maintaining real-time leaderboards.
By integrating the Playoff SDK with your software you will be able to
easily bind every event on your product with a corresponding Playoff
action.
CREATING A GAME
We call all gamified systems a Game on Playoff. This does not mean
that they are the sort of games you play everyday like Angry Birds or
Candy Crush Saga.
A Game on Playoff is a system of processes, teams, metrics and rules
which come together to engage a player in an experience.
The experience could be anything from visiting a website to doing work
in your office.Playoff acts as the game engine behind these systems.

PLAYOFF
TYPES OF GAME
A Playoff game can take many forms. It could be a simple website with
a gamified loyalty program. It could even be a completely customized
gamification product for a particular problem domain. Eg: Fitness
workout gamification. External games need a dedicated development
team to create the user experience for the game from scratch.
Creating a game on Playoff is simple once you’ve registered and signed
into the platform.
Go to the Playground tab in your profile
Click the Create Game button
Fill in the Title of your Game and give it a unique ID which will
identify it from all the other games on the platform.
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Hit the Create button and Voila!
You created a game!
You should see a page like the
one below listing out all the basic
settings of your game.
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PLAYOFF
COMPONENTS OF A GAME
Metrics what you measure within a game. They are used to track player performance and
behaviors. Eg: Points, Badges, Achievement, etc.
Learn more: Playoff Metrics Manual
Actions are the most basic way of capturing player actions; can be used to capture
simple player events such as liking a post or finishing a quiz.
Learn more: Playoff Actions Manual
Processes that allow the game designer to structure the player journey. You can use
processes to control the order in which players can perform the tasks available to
them. Processes can model common activities on a site like answering questions,
voting, sharing, etc.
Learn more: Playoff Processes Manual
Teams define a subset of players within your game and can be easily used to model
teams within your organization.
Learn more: Playoff Teams Manual
Rules state conditions which, when fulfilled, affect the player in some way. You can
use them to award achievements and level up players when they get a certain
amount of points.
Learn more: Playoff Rules Manual
Leaderboards that you can use to drive competitive behaviors within a game. Playoff’s
leaderboards come with a ton of features that take you to the next level. All
leaderboards are updated in real time!
Learn more: Playoff Leaderboards Manual

PLAYOFF
SIMULATING A GAME
Once your game is completely designed, it is now ready for some
testing.
Playoff allows you to simulate your game and check for any flaws in your
design.
ENVIRONMENTS & GAME DEPLOYMENT
There are 2 environments into which you can deploy your game:
Staging: The staging environment is a test environment. It
resembles the production environment in all aspects except for
the fact that it cannot have any actual player accounts.
Production: The production environment is used to run a live
online application. It can allow real Playoff users to join your game
as players.
During deployment Playoff will take apart your game design and
rebuild it from scratch. Playoff optimizes your game for speed and
performance during this step.
The final product is a customized game engine for your game.
You can simulate your game by clicking the Simulate button on the top
bar.
If Playoff finds any issues in your game it will show you a dialog that
looks something like this:
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PLAYOFF
FIXING A BROKEN GAME DESIGN
It may surprise you to know how easy it can be to break a game. It
can happen from something as innocent as deleting a metric and
forgetting to remove rewards that were using it. Playoff takes care of
finding such problems and pointing them out to you so that you can
take appropriate action to correct it.
Playoff looks for errors on all the components of your game before
it tries to deploy the game. This allows you to have temporary
inconsistencies in your game during the design phase.
Once Playoff detects an error it highlights the component with a red
alert box in the listing on the left side of the screen.
You can then open up the component to get a better idea of what
broke. Playoff will highlight different areas of the component and what
issues exist.

PLAYOFF
Once you’ve make changes to the component the alert box disappears
indicating that the component has changed since finding the issue.
To test if your fix worked simply try to simulate the game again. If
everything goes well you should see an all clear dialog. You will need to
fix all the issues in your game before you get an all clear.
GAMIFICATION FOR DUMMIES
Once the game has been deployed you can access it by going to Menu
> Developer Tools > Simulator.
You can also go directly to the simulator at the url
http://games.playoffgamification.io/`your-game-id`/simulator/
Dummies are mock players you can use to test out your game on.
Besides not whining and complaining about what a boring job
testing can be, dummies help you check if all your achievements, lane
candidate checks, processes, etc behave as expected.
Creating a Dummy:
Click the + icon on the top left
Enter a unique ID for the dummy in the modal that pops up.
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You can test out all the aspects of your game using the simulator
including real-time notifications.

PLAYOFF
Some of the things you can do within the simulator include
View a Player Profile
Playing an Action
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Starting a Process
Inviting Players to a Process
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Playing a Process
Creating a Team
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Inviting a Player to the team
Leaving a team
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Checking Leaderboards
Get Real time Notifications
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ADMINISTER YOUR GAME
Once you’ve got the game running in the staging or production
environment you will feel the urge to check up on things on a regular
basis. It’s only human. You may be wondering what the hell is going on
in my game ?
This is exactly why we made the Game Explorer. To open the game
explorer:
Click the Menu button
Select Developer Tools and click Explorer
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Select the environment you want to explore and then click the
listing you want inspect.
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THere are 4 lists available in each environment in the explorer:
1. Players
You can see a complete list of all the players in your game over here.
If you click the view icon you can see more details about each player.
You can also correct the player’s scores here in case you found him
cheating. Also if you’ve created private bootstrapped teams this is the
only way you can put a player into that team.
2. Teams
You can view a complete list of Team instances created by players
within your game. With each team you can see a complete listing of all

PLAYOFF
3. Processes
You can view a complete list of Process instances created by players
within your game. In each process you can see the performers and what
lanes they are part of.
4. Game Activity
Here you can view all of your game’s activity logs.
There are also sections to view the game’s API call logs, usage statistics
and game’s batch jobs.
TIME TO LAUNCH!
Once you have completed tweaking and perfecting your design you can
launch your game so that other users on the Playoff Platform can start
using it.
Click the Launcher button•
Click the green Launch button. This run some checks on your game
and if everything looks good will put the game live on
http://games.playoffgamification.io/your-game-id
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PLAYOFF
MODIFYING YOUR GAME
So you imagined that gamifying your business processes once was
going to solve all your problems forever! But alas, things aren’t going as
planned...
A few months down the line you realize that you’re giving too much
importance to how many appointments employees go to, instead of
how many are actually yielding results. Or maybe you find out that you
forgot to take into account certain tasks while creating your process.
Whatever the situation maybe, changing the gamified system should
be as simple as creating a new one! So, why not try our hands with
changing the newly created game?
All you need to do to change a game is to launch it again. Any updates
to the components you made will be reflected immediately within the
game.
A more detailed explanation of what happens when you change a
component follows.
Actions
You can change almost everything about an action after it is created
except its ID.
Processes
All existing instances of a modified process will run to completion
based on the original process design they were created from. Any new
instances of the changed process definitions will use the modified
design to run.
Metrics
The only parts of metric which can be modified after launching a game
are its name and its constraints. Changing the Type or ID of a metric
is not allowed due to the adverse backlash it could have on existing
players who have earned scores in those metrics.
Teams
If the team structure is modified all existing instances will stay the
same. Any new instances of the changed team definitions will use the
modified structure. Each team which wants to get upgraded to the
new structure will have to be disbanded and reformed.

PLAYOFF
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Rules
If an achievement rule is modified any achievements earned from
the old achievement rule will remain untouched. New achievements
earned by players will be based on the modified rule.
If a levelling rule is modified all players levels will updated to conform to
the modified levelling rule the next time they gain a point.
CONCLUSION
We hope this guide helped you get a better understanding of the
Playoff Platform and what it is capable of. New features are being
added everyday, and we’ll be updating this guide as time passes. We
aim to use this as a comprehensive introduction to the Platform till we
create more interactive and engaging teaching methods.
If you have any suggestions or questions about a feature not covered in
this guide, feel free to write to support@playoffgamification.io and we’ll
see to it right away!