My Journey to the World of Game Design
I stepped into UI/ UX nearly 4 years back. This field still fascinates me as it did back then. Every day is a new learning and this version of me is a lot wiser than I used to be.
Being a user of various products until 21 years of my life, I got my enlightenment as an experience designer at the age of 23, after my masters in design from IIITDM Jabalpur. This was a whole new feeling. I started observing things differently, I would look at IRCTC as a classic case for heuristic evaluation, instead of as a mode of reservation. An additional step in the Amazon checkout journey makes me curse. I realised why I happily paid Rs 150 rupees a Starbuck coffee experience while arguing for 20 rupees at a college side “Tappri”.
It is a strange feeling to realise that the happiness you get on having KitKat after exams or opening the cork of seasoned champagne was a perfect execution of a well-planned experience by an experience designer sitting somewhere around the world. It is not less than a ‘magic’.
In this short span of my career, I am blessed to have worked across B2B, B2C and C2C domain. They aren’t internally connected but when knitted together paved my path as a game UI/UX designer for games 24x7. Working on enterprise products at Gravity Consulting gave me a good hold on process-centric approaches for Design, While my next venture in a hybrid e-com and retail experience at Decathlon gave me an in-depth knowledge of User-centric approaches to create wow experiences.
Is UX for game any different?
Hell yes.
“UX is about the clarity that hides complexity, and game design is about the clarity that teaches complexity.”
UXD revolves around the simple principle of “making user’s experience as seamless as possible”. With enhancement in technology came endless possibilities of creative and complex systems which try to build new norms which the user is not accustomed to. UXD is about giving a high-level overview to the user. Its simplicity hides the complexity demanded by the technology. UXD makes it possible for the user to complete a task like copying a file from one space to the other in a few clicks while in reality thousands of lines of code and a masterpiece of technology runs in the background to make it possible.
However in game design, the primary objective is to keep the user as engaged as possible. Spiking user’s senses to its peak is what is considered to be a true win in game design. In a classic strategic game, the user may have to take multiple decisions at a time, and the system should facilitate this by making all key parameters upfront always visible to the user at any point of time. Now this may sound like ‘cognitive overload’ to many, but this is the place where the need for a game designer stands out. It’s his/her duty to make a complex journey easy to understand and executable because every second in a game counts.
Experience is what may “make” or “break” a loyal customer base.
The Games I Deal With
I deal with real money games at games 24x7. Few examples of them are Rummy circle, Ultimate teen Patti and My eleven circle. At the same time, I work on a campaign management tool called “Snapyr” which is being built in-house from scratch.
What are real money games and how they are different from casual games?
Real money games are the games where the user needs to pay an entry fee for the gameplay. The entire business model runs on money collected from the user as a token amount.
Casual games are the games where no fee is asked from the user for the gameplay, instead their revenue model runs on the advertisement displayed to the user between the gameplay.
What are the challenges with real money games?
Following are the challenges which we as game designers face on a regular basis when it comes to real money games.
1.) Cultural /social barrier- In many parts of our country, it’s a taboo to play card games in spite of the Supreme Court’s considering card games to be games of skill hence legal.
2.) Economical barrier- India being 112th out of 164 countries in terms of per capita income, the average annual income of a household comes down to Rs 143000. It’s really hard to encourage users towards real money game where they need to pay in order to play.
3.) Judiciary — Various states have their own sets of regulations when it comes to real money games. These regulations need strict consideration while designing a uniform experience to avoid any conflict of interest.
4.) Responsible gaming- There is no running away from the fact that real money games are highly addictive. Being a value-driven company, it’s our prime responsibility to discourage addictive gaming and any form of exploitation.
5.) Data- Being a data-driven company, every decision, no matter how fancy it may sound on paper needs to be backed by data. Data helps in analysing users behaviour, spending patterns, habits to create new market opportunity and to analyse potential threats. We need good research and facts to challenge the monopoly of data because sometimes even data lacks a ‘human touch’.
How do we overcome such challenges?
This is where team efforts really play a crucial role.
A team of data scientists works tirelessly to identify new gaming patterns, whether it is in user behaviour or something that threatens our value of responsible gaming. These stats are further analysed and presented to our team of highly skilled business analysts. They decode this status in business terms and identify potential opportunity areas.
These opportunity areas are further narrowed down to problem statements which are finally handed over to the Product design team, comprising of product managers, Game UX designers and visual designers.
As UX designers, it’s our responsibility to go the root cause ofthis problem, ask the right sets of questions like when, where, whom & how. If the data supported by the Data analysis team is not evident enough to answer these questions, new events are requested to be logged in GA(Google analytics) to track custom journeys required for design intervention. This leads us to a brief understanding of the subject in order to come up with a feasible and viable solution. Journey maps, Comment inference method, rainbow spreadsheet, are few examples of the UX methodologies adopted midway to support the final outcome. Once done right, we land with UX goals which are brainstormed upon to come up with concepts which promise desired results. Multiple rounds of feedback and implementation sessions, lead us to the final UX deliverables which are widely agreed upon, rigorously analysed against ROI and Promised KPIs. And from here the UI phase starts which delivers polished & finished screens, ready to be developed.
What to do when there are multiple good solutions to a problem?
This is where A/B testing comes handy.
Finished UI is provided to the Dev Team. They further do branching of the users in the backend. Let’s say if 2000 Users are online at a particular time & A/B testing is configured, then we can decide that A set of the user will continue with Path A while B set of users will be presented with Path B, where A and B were two branches comprising 2 sets of journeys handed by the Product design team. Likewise, multiple branches can be configured & events can be recorded against them. Later when these stats are presented in a wider forum, decisions around which path to continue with are made based statistics collected.
Is game designing fun?
Absolutely, gaming is the pinnacle of UX design. Every challenge presents a new set of opportunities and brings new learning to the table. Data makes your decisions wiser, and in the long term, you are left with some fancy terms in your vocabulary which help your profile stand out from the crowd. Moreover, you also get to test every game for free. Fun right 😎
