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July 2, 2024
By Aaron Vontell, Founder and CEO of Regression Games
In the fast-paced world of startups, it's easy to get caught up in the daily grind of hitting deadlines, addressing customer needs, and fixing urgent bugs. While these activities are crucial for immediate success, they can overshadow something equally important: innovation that shapes your company's future. At Regression Games, we've found a solution to this common startup challenge through our Innovation Friday initiative.
Every Friday, our entire team has the opportunity to step away from their regular tasks and dive into experiments, prototypes, and innovations that can propel our product into new territory. This isn't just another company perk – it's a strategic and purposeful initiative that has become core to how we develop new features and push the boundaries of AI-enabled game testing. It has helped us build a better product and allowed us to be named one of the most innovative gaming startups to watch in 2025, so let's dive into how we do it!
The concept of Innovation Friday was inspired by my experience at Instabase, where yearly hackathons consistently produced features that significantly impacted the company's direction. These events showed how dedicated innovation time could unlock creativity and lead to unexpected breakthroughs. However, waiting for annual events wasn't enough – we needed a more regular cadence of innovation.
Why? Because when you're focused on high-priority customer features and hitting immediate deadlines, it becomes challenging to think about those bigger, riskier ideas that could revolutionize your product months from now. By making innovation a weekly event, we've created a sustainable way to build for today and tomorrow. This has been a game changer for our team, as automated game testing is a rapidly changing field where newer AI technology has opened the floodgates for new ways of thinking.
One of our key learnings has been the importance of active encouragement. There's always a natural tendency for team members to focus on their weekly tasks – after all, those deadlines aren't going away. We've found success by making Innovation Friday a core part of our culture, encouraging team members to share their planned experiments the day before and celebrating both successes and failures.
We've seen our team use this time in diverse ways that combine learning with practical experimentation. From exploring new Large Language Models (LLMs) to implementing crucial UI/UX improvements in our Unity SDK, the focus is on both personal growth and product enhancement. We encourage team members to maintain a running list of ideas throughout the week as they interact with users and test our product – any non-urgent idea with potential becomes fair game for Innovation Friday.
While Innovation Friday is about looking ahead, we always ground our experiments in real user problems. If an innovative idea can solve a current user's challenge while pushing our technology forward, that's the sweet spot we're looking for. This approach has helped us maintain relevance while pushing boundaries.
Our Innovation Friday experiments have led to several breakthrough features and improvements. Here are some concrete examples.
One of our more recent experiments involved using Claude for computer use in gameplay testing. In just one Friday, we were able to evaluate the performance and capabilities of this framework for automated QA, providing valuable insights for our roadmap. Another experiment focused on using LLMs to generate C# Unity code for behavior tree nodes that control game agents – this experiment was successful and was eventually turned into a complete product feature, our Agent Builder tool!
Innovation Friday has also driven significant improvements to our core platform. Team members have used this time to:
One of our key learnings has been the importance of scope management. We encourage team members to design experiments that can reach a natural evaluation point within a day. While it's perfectly fine to extend promising projects across multiple Fridays, we've seen better results with smaller, focused prototypes that can be evaluated quickly and then expanded upon in subsequent sessions.
This approach helps maintain momentum and ensures that even if an experiment doesn't pan out, we've learned valuable lessons without over-investment. It's about finding that sweet spot between ambition and practicality.
Through Innovation Friday, we've pushed the boundaries of what's possible in game testing while maintaining a rapid pace of product development. These experiments have led to improvements across our entire platform, from our Unity SDK to our enterprise features, all while keeping us at the forefront of AI-powered testing solutions.
As we continue to evolve our Innovation Friday program, we're constantly amazed by the creativity and ingenuity of our team. It's proof that when you give talented people the space to innovate, they'll not only solve today's challenges but help shape tomorrow's solutions.
We're excited to continue pushing the boundaries of game testing and AI innovation, and we'd love for you to be part of this journey:
Ready to see how our innovations can transform your game testing process? Book a demo today to learn more about our AI-powered testing solutions.
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