A glimpse at game UX!
For those who are not accustomed with this game, FarmVille2: CountryEscape(FV2CE) is the successor of famous FarmVille game which was part of Facebook in the early decades of 2000.The evolution of mobile gaming and Facebook’s updated policies led to game’s forced shift from web.
FV2CE is more or less a farm simulation game. As, it is with all the farm sim games, FV2CE also has its wide range of order boards and limited time features which keep players engaged in their farm. When I began my journey in gaming, I was working on regular cadences and was trying to soak in the nuances of the gaming industry from mainstream IT industry. The requirement for a new feature presented itself as a one time opportunity, which would help me establish myself as an Experience Designer in the team. Thus began the journey!
First step: Ideation
We were a small team of three at this stage. Product Manager, who gives the direction on what the feature should accomplish. Designer, who suggests the interesting aspects of possible mechanics and fiction to use. And comes the Experience Designer(myself), who doesn’t have a clue what needs to be done.
And it was alright. Being not so familiar with commonly used game mechanics and not being the number’s guy to figure out expected outcome PM suggests, I sat listening.
“The ability to practice active listening is key,” suggests Paul. “This means not just hearing and comprehending what stakeholders and users are saying, but also conveying back to them what you’re hearing. This is a great way to confirm your understanding, by the way.”
So I started listening, actively! I educated them on what users are and how to design keeping users in mind. I listened to the list of possible themes to choose for the feature and asked how to choose one! Choosing a theme based on our personal opinion was not the best route to take, which everyone obviously knew. But how to know what user likes??
Being in an ecosystem where we handle multiple farming games, we didn’t had to search farther. We could just learn from other games experience and see what resonates mostly with the target audience. Also, we have our player communities where we could ask opinion on what they like to see in game. This gives us certain filters to land at the right theme.
Similar for the game mechanic. We know what mechanic works well with the audience and what our competition is doing. There is no glory in reinventing the wheel but, there is always a possibility of being the first. When we say not to reinvent the wheel and design based on what others are doing, it definitely doesn’t mean that you should stick to what is already done. It just means that, learn from others and impart those learnings into your product. So, finally we have a seed of an idea which is worth investing in. Ideation process complete!
Second step: Pre-Production
Life was all chit chat until this stage. Now the work begins. One fact about game experience design is, game strive on the friction that it presents to the user. And it’s this friction that the player enjoy strategising against and winning. It’s one item that provides self actualisation for users. But, what does friction mean to you as an experience designer.
Being an experience designer we strive to reduce friction in user journey!
Wait, let me rephrase the sentence a bit.
Being an experience designer we strive to reduce unwanted friction in user journey!!
This might be more or less what we do as a game experience designer. If user’s intention is to plant a wheat seed, water it and wait to harvest it, then we should reduce the unwanted friction in that journey. The system should have enough affordance to let user do these actions. The user interface should be neatly knit to allow seamless information flow. User should be notified when the seed is all grown up and ready to be harvested.
Again, this everyone knows. The problem at hand is to design a system that satisfies these usability heuristics and documenting it. And it is in the pre-production phase we think and start to build the basics of how the system should be. We do competitive analysis to understand how other games are handling these user flows. We check in-game features to design a system that is consistent.
Start with bare minimum sketches. Find a surface and start drawing. This is where you get most of your insights and can be the fastest way to ideate if you have the stakeholders present in the room.
Based on our learning we start designing information architecture and user flows. As and when we get more clarity, we build wireframes and do quick click through prototype to get a feel of the concept. At the end of numerous iterations and lots of discussions we have all the user flows and wireframes required to build the feature.
Third step: Production
This is the stage where the product starts to take shape. Unity is the tool which was used to build the game. Though being a Computer Science Engineer, I had no clue how unity worked. But, I was inspired and curious enough to learn. After a tone of tutorials and constant monitoring from other developers I managed to get a hang of what needs to be done. I started to put together the UI in unity. I created atlas, updated it, build prefabs and edited those. Attached animations and 3D characters. Even learned how to manage the files through GIT!!
But, as we know at the end of every struggle there is a silver lining. And mine was really far!! My first iterations were crappy. Team missed QA drop timelines. New timelines were decided. Worked day and night, even on weekends! After countless iterations and endless bug fixes, there it was — the silver lining! And believe me, it was beautiful. Played the feature build first time in an iPad. That’s the moment you feel proud about yourself and about your creation. Now begins the wait.
Fourth step: Post-production
No matter how glorious the product is, it doesn’t matter if the audience does not love it. As the feature was build around lot of assumptions, it was time to validate those. We released the feature to the audience and waited. It’s not really a wait per se, rather moved on to other projects. But still we would eagerly wait for PMs routine mail on feature performance.
The feature did perform above expectations. And it mattered a lot as the game currently was struggling to retain players. Users needed some motivation or assurance to keep them in the game. And this feature provided exactly that. The revenue goals were out performed! The feature had a healthy completion rate.
This was understandably a tough experience to get into the gaming industry. But, knowing how it performed fuelled my ambition. Since then, in my 2 years of experience with FV2CE, I designed four new features, did couple of feature redesigns and countless number of optimisations.
Life at gaming industry(or any other industry) is fun when you get to taste the success. So, keep your head down and work towards that first success. It will change your life and make you a better designer.
