Introduction to UX in Game Design
What are designers’ secrets to making great games?
For over a year, I’ve been working as a game designer in a studio that develops VR multiplayer experiences for arcade rooms. In this role, one of my biggest challenges was to design these experiences for a rather specific audience: the “non-players”.
As you can imagine, this makes using video games codes established over the last 40 years a bit complicated, especially when you put an audience at the heart of your experience who has possibly never played a video game.
For these reasons, my work was about keeping things simple, without being simplistic at all.
As a designer, it means considering a few things before starting a project. This includes avoiding features overload, complex interfaces, trading systems or anything that requires an extensive learning phase of the game.
Despite these constraints, the main challenge is to create a unique and enjoyable experience for anyone. The majority of these people come to discover something totally new for them, looking for an exciting and intense moment to share with friends.
So when I developed the mechanics for VR experiences, I had to make them easy to learn, engaging, intuitive and scalable for quite short game sessions (from 10 to 40 minutes).
Once all the gameplay loops, balancing tables and pacing curves have been completed, this is where it all begins.
A quick overview of UX design
There is no exact definition of what User Experience (UX) is, as this discipline is mainly about improving the experience and the way people interact with a given product.
UX design is often associated with User Interface (UI), and involves the construction of elements like navigation, ergonomics, usability and user path in a given interface (website, mobile app, video game, and even those ticket vending machines that drive me insane).
In fact, UX covers a much wider range of fields including product design, economic systems, all kinds of services and by extension our everyday life.
As you can expect, it refers to several cognitive aspects when using a product or service, including functional and emotional expectations by placing the user (and not just the function) at the heart of the usage scenario.
This image shows some terms to consider when designing the UX, but the point to keep in mind is that with cognitive psychology, a design can go from an objectively functional state to one that can provide a very good subjective feeling when used.
And since we’re here to talk about games, we are going to address the subject from a game design perspective and how to make them more engaging.
What is UX applied to game design?
If your goal is to create a game the way From Software does because you love the idea of making things really hard, be aware that your game should NEVER be unfair to players.
And by “unfair” I mean the fact that crucial information is not or badly displayed to the player at the right time or place. To avoid this, you’ll need some good signs and feedbacks in your game.
Signs
To simplify, signs are the information you give players to warn them that something is going to happen and that they must react accordingly.
Feedbacks
They are the response to an action that has just been performed (whether it comes from the player or the game’s system) indicating that it has been a success or a failure.
Beyond the role of pure information, feedbacks are mostly used for visual, audio and haptic rewards (including VFX, SFX, controller vibrations and so on). Basically, these rewards make any event or action more enjoyable.
As a result, designers use UX in most aspects of their games since players need to be able to clearly (and often quickly) interpret all crucial actions occurring in every given situation.
All of this while enjoying the various rewards listed above which give the game its unique flavor. We’re talking about entertainment, right?
“Every designer has the opportunity to create something incredibly unique. At the same time, every designer faces the risk of creating something that no one will be able to understand.”
— Will Wright, Game designer
Feedbacks for informations and feeling
In this footage from Batman: Arkham City, the signs and feedbacks have two important functions.
Firstly, they serve to make the state of the game (combo increment) and NPCs to be both clear and understandable by using visual markers on their heads (one enemy is going to attack, another has been knocked out).
The second function is the feeling of impact during certain actions thanks to various feedbacks (speed trail effect and particles on Batman) as well as the camera which will shake or slow down to amplify certain sensations such as a powerful attack of the player.
These feedbacks are part of what designers call the “game feel” or “juice”.
As you can expect, these choices are not insignificant. As they are a subtle mix of game design (close combat mechanics) and UX design (feelings of strength and speed), they help ensure that the battle remains easily readable despite being surrounded by many enemies.
Feedbacks for emotions and depth
Another example is Katana ZERO in which the developers paid particular attention to the written dialogues.
You can see the way some words are displayed to make them more impactful, whether it is through animation, sound, colors and camera shakes that give much more depth to the dialogues between the characters.
These visual and audio feedbacks allow us to feel the weight of certain lines, in addition to developing empathy for the characters within the story simply through text and staging.
Also, you may have noticed the red bar under the dialogues. It allows players to interrupt a dialogue by acting within the time limit. By doing so, the text breaks and falls, emphasizing our character’s emotions even more.
Which benefits does UX have in gameplay?
Through these examples, we get an insight into how simple mechanics can be exploited with the idea of amplifying their depth.
When designing with game feel in mind, the goal is to provide a wide range of satisfying feedbacks in every actions through animations, visual/sound effects, camera behavior, animated post-process, and more.
As you noticed, each of those visual effects (on the cars, the camera, during a goal) brings more credibility to the universe, both in terms of immersion and engagement, and even in a game with fancy physics.
And when it comes to immersion, it doesn’t refer to stunning graphics. It’s about the gameplay’s consistency in its fictional universe, and the way the game feel makes the experience much more appealing.
Why does it matter when making a game?
In my job, I like the idea of exploring the possibilities of interaction between humans and systems, and how to reinforce these interactions through the sensations and emotions provided by the gameplay, even beyond level design, staging or storytelling.
The game experience first
Here is one of the prototyping phases of Ori and the blind forest. These images show us how to get a great game feel with a simple cube as soon as we put in some of the feedbacks mentioned before.
By focusing on the game experience through the character’s actions, the team of designers makes sure that each added element (art, audio, level design, visual effects and so on) will increase the satisfaction already provided by the game mechanics.
By doing so, you can get a much better prototype that allows players to have fun simply by interacting with the game’s system, no matter whether you’re designing a shooter/adventure/city building game or anything else.
What other UX usages for game design?
Onboarding
Another crucial aspect of a game is definitely the onboarding (or FTUE for first-time user experience), which will define the tutorial and the way to introduce players into the game and its story.
Onboarding is about answering questions such as:
- How players will evolve at the beginning of the game?
- How to teach them the mechanics? The goal of the game?
- How to validate their knowledge? In which order?
- Is there any narrative justification? Is it meaningful?
“People learn and remember better what is meaningful to them, and emotional.”
— Celia Hodent, UX designer
Usability and Ergonomics
Among the areas related to human-machine interactions figure usability and ergonomics, which create THE link between the game, the players and the game controller. The aim is to make the controls easy to use while keeping the game state constantly clear and legible.
Usability focuses on questions like:
- Which input is the most appropriate to perform a given action?
- Do players have to remember some controls?
- Are the controls consistent and intuitive enough?
- Is the game (and UI) status always clearly legible?
“The focus is not to make the game easy, but rather to make it so the player is able to easily experience the game. The game could be really hard, but it should be easy to figure out how to play it and improve.”
— Philippe Chambon, UX designer
And there’s more
With this overview of some games UX practices, we could also mention cognitive affordance, visual language, or accessibility to go even further. All of these aspects make the overall experience of your game more intuitive and allows you to reach a wider audience when applied.
That’s why you should keep in mind that it’s a good practice to design your game from the players’ perspective, their culture, feelings and needs.
Ok, but how to deal with UX issues?
Sometimes you may be in a situation where you can’t solve a UX problem because you are not able to identify exactly what’s wrong with the game.
Is there anything that is wrongly perceived by the players? Do they fail to perform a given task? As a result, you end up with players who don’t behave quite the way you intended.
Where to begin?
When I have to find a design solution that involves UX, I try to analyse other games with similar design aspects, and list what players need to perform a specific task (and how they might do it).
Then, the goal is to determine what would possibly be their reaction and behavior in a given situation. After finding a possible answer, I check if it matches the game’s needs:
- Will all players be able to interpret the information correctly?
- Does the solution fit with the established game design intentions?
- Isn’t there a more appropriate option to consider?
Once prototyped, I proceed with playtests in order to iterate and refine quickly until the most efficient solution is found. That’s the classic process, but combined with analytic tools, user surveys or observation sessions, this one made me discover some useful tips.
Playtests and user surveys
While supervising playtests, I realized the importance of players’ instant reactions and how they subjectively perceive the game, with their own feelings, emotions and knowledge.
So when writing user surveys, I replaced questions like “What is the main objective of the game?” with sentences to complete such as “While playing, my goal was to…” in a way that they could answer from their own experience.
A few examples:
- During this sequence, I felt myself…
- To grab a weapon, I used…
- I found the difficulty in this sequence to be…
For what results?
The benefit of this approach provides answers for both the understanding of the game and the positive/negative emotions felt by playtesters, such as excitement or boredom while completing a task.
By asking open-ended questions from their perspective, I often get a clear and authentic insight that is more relevant when analyzing the game experience.
