https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X22JOkfCuYE

Dragon Hound is a multiplayer online FPS/RPG for console and PC, built around hunting monsters to progress. The project had passed pre-production, where core gameplay was defined, and was in early production, starting to build out the game's meta systems. The team needed a UI/UX designer to make the game designers' prototypes legible to players.

I joined as the only UI/UX designer on the team and split the work along two axes, gameplay and menus, where immersion and usability were in conflict. I rebuilt prototypes for every screen carrying UI, iterated on playtest feedback, and implemented the result in Unreal UMG.

Platform Console · PC

Duration 10 months (Mar 2019 - Dec 2019)

Team 1 UX designer, 3 game designers, 2 UI programmers, 1 QA

Tools Unreal, XD, Photoshop, Excel, Illustrator

Progress

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1.Background: why this work started

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Internal Playtest —

An internal playtest surfaced two main issues. Players struggled to understand the function and end-to-end flow of features as the game designers had intended them. They also got lost when looking for information or functions inside the game, repeatedly.

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Stakeholder interview #1: implementation cost —

In core gameplay, characters move and interact with objects in the game world. Outside core gameplay, the cost was too high, so characters cannot move or interact with objects.

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Stakeholder interview #2: platform change —

Dragon Hound started as a mobile game, then changed direction to console and PC mid-project.

2. Problem definition: what I found

bandicam 2019-09-09 14-50-37-986.mp4

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The creative director treated immersion as the most important quality across the whole game, and used diegetic UI wherever possible.

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This is where I found a trade-off between usability and immersion.

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Putting all UI onto 3D surfaces was meant to give players a highly immersive way to interact, but the text was blurry and the result was uncomfortable to use. The connection to the game world stays intact, which is good for immersion, but the 3D objects carrying the UI also pick up the world's lighting and materials, and usability suffers for it.

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