Game UI ♥

[ilovegameui]

Cover Letters and Why You Should Love Them

We’ve all seen it before: the dreaded “please attach cover letter” or “applications without a cover letter will not be considered.” I think most people hate writing cover letters, and I used to really hate them too. The Googling “cover letter template,” the copy/pasting and rewriting... it was so awkward and tedious and just felt like a complete waste of time, another piece of filler in the application process.

I’m not sure when or even how it clicked for me, but the past few years I’ve realized I’ve had the completely wrong attitude about it. We hear the phrase “Just be yourself!” a lot in our society, but it feels like there are just some areas where this doesn’t get applied to as a matter of fact. People believe cover letters have to be formal and stuffy, so naturally they hate writing them (unless you naturally like to be formal and stuffy, I suppose...). This is where I had my revelation... what if I actually wrote like myself in this letter?

I think what prompted me to have this thought was the way the job description was written. The recruiter had written it in a very laid back and casual manner... like a friend describing the job to you, in person, over a cup of coffee at a cafe. I wrote back as if I were talking to that person, answering the questions the job req seemed to be begging and explaining my qualifications as though I were in a conversation with a real person and not writing on a cold dead piece of paper.

Ever since then, I’ve loved writing cover letters. I treat them as though I’m writing to a friend of a friend, introducing myself. I put little jokes and anecdotes in, write genuinely from the heart, and never have any trouble with it because I feel like myself when writing it.

So stop freaking out when you see those cover letter requirements! The company wants to know about your skills and experience of course, but they also want to know who you are, and you should never be afraid to show that. ♥

[ilovegameui]

Let’s Get Started... with a Rant!

I’ve been wanting to start this blog for a long time because there are surprisingly few resources for game UI/UX designers out there. And let’s be real, UI/UX wasn’t even a thing like ten years ago-- the field is finally being taken seriously, and it’s nice to finally see better UI/UX in games nowadays.

Even still, it is disturbing how it seems there are very few best practices documented out there for making game UI... which brings me here. Hopefully this blog entertains or informs someone down the line. I’ll be posting tutorials, tips, reviews, my work, and other rantings about the game industry and game UI/UX design specifically.

And what better way to start than with an unpopular opinion article! We’ve all seen terrible UX design where it seems like nobody was paying attention to how the final game came together... but today’s topic is about people who think way too hard about UX. I’m talking about all those fluffy articles written about user experience with buzzwords. 

Before anyone says anything, I am in no way discounting the value of UX and thorough research. It’s the attitude of these articles that baffles me... They all sound like they’re written by robots studying players/users like they’re some kind of alien lifeform.

All it takes to be an effective UX designer is a talent for information layout (graphic design, visual hierarchy, etc.) and some hard work playing, living, and breathing the game you are designing an interface for. By far the biggest fault I see in other UX designers is not doing the latter... they want to treat the product like it’s dog food-- that is, 1) something that they develop, but don’t consume, and 2) that is consumed by a creature that they have to study, that can’t communicate with them or properly explain what they want or like. 

(I’ll add a little disclaimer here saying that yeah, maybe the average player can’t tell you in depth why a certain design or layout isn’t working for them, but the amount of disrespect and treating of players like “rocks with arms” that need every little thing spelled out for them is appalling, and this is quite common in the industry)

It sounds stupid to say that being an avid player of the game you are developing is the key to success, but seriously, not enough UX designers do this. When you’re an active consumer of a game, you know exactly how the game design works. But more than that, you experience the emotions of being a player, thinking and feeling what they feel. You know when gameplay is dragging or tedious, you know what the most frustrating moments and/or pinch points are, as well as the best and most exciting moments. 

And as a UX designer, that’s where you can learn to smooth out those rough gameplay flows, easing the tedious and frustrating points, and make the exciting moments even better. That’s it. Simple.

I’ll give a quick example of this with Desinty 2. Before I started playing, I would hear people complain about various parts of the game, but I never knew what those things were until I started playing and sinking countless hours into the game. Now, I can give examples for those 3 moments above:

1) A tedious moment: The load times between planets are tedious, and it’s also a pain to have to go back to the Tower to look at your inventory/collect bounties

2) A frustrating moment: Random teammates in Gambit will frequently steal those last few motes you need in order to summon a blocker

3) An exciting moment: Getting an exotic drop

I’m sure every player (non designer) knows about the above 3 moments, but as a designer I can now take this experience that I have as a player and begin to dissect and come up with solutions for them.

For the tedious moment, I would have players load into the Tower upon game load, instead of out in Orbit. I would also design a UI system that would allow you to store/retrieve items from your main menu and get quests from the map screen. 

For the frustrating moments in Gambit, better UI needs to be made to help communicate to teammates how many motes you have... I would probably do this with a combo of more bold/obvious mote UI counters, plus audio cues and coloration (i.e. a teammate is flashing or something when they are close to getting the last mote needed for a blocker). The Drifter could also include these developments in his commentary as he talks over the fight.

Lastly, for exotics I would think about making the moment juicier with particles, or even a larger piece of UI a la the level up/rank up banners. Another idea would be to really highlight special exotics, such as those only obtainable from Nightfall strikes, or alternately having an ultra fancy moment for exotics that you are collecting for the first time. 

Currently, getting an exotic has a dramatic sound effect and some slightly fancier visualization, but for the most part it has the same animations as picking up any ol’ engram. I’m at the point in the game (and I’m sure lots of other people are too) where I’ve ground out most of the content, and I’m only missing a few of those ultra rare exotics. In fact, I don’t even play Destiny regularly anymore because I’ve obtained most of the content I care to collect, and when I last played I didn’t even get excited when I see those yellow engrams drop anymore since I knew they’d be dupes :(

The above are just examples, and by no means perfect solutions, but my point is that the moments I described are things that all players know about, but that designers can make even better... and that only by playing avidly are you able to identify those moments. The me that heard friends and coworkers complaining about it would never have been able to come up with solutions so easily and directly if I had treated the game and players as something to be studied out of a text book. So let’s stop reading lofty UX articles that contain a ricegrain of useful information at best and play the game already!