Timeline
December - June 2022 (28 weeks)
My Role
UX Design POC - I was the lead representative from the UX team, ensuring the concept of a better experience is present in all steps of the project when strategising and preparing our methodology.
Design Goal
Rewarding players extra, especially the risk-takers with frequent rewards and straightforward mechanics that let them aim to win big
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To craft experience through research flows, and emphasis to enhance player experience by touring the whole factory of Wonka and rewarding players. How to create a reward system so that players can earn big rewards in short burst sessions?
Solution
The principle of Loss Aversion is the key
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When approaching this project, we decided to break down how we wanted to have phases for each part of the project. This includes challenges, research, concepts, business requirements.
Breaking down the system requirements
Competitive Analysis
Psychology concept associated with it is, that “losses loom larger than gains”
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Loss aversion is the idea that losses are more psychologically impactful than gains. Most of the time this particular principle is avoided for specific reasons. Most of the time game designers want to avoid triggering this feeling, but not always. But with eligible requirements, it makes more sense to have in when necessary.
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Identifying the common patterns, essential elements, usability patterns, and cons among the competitive games helps the most during the discovery phase
Common Patterns
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A wide variety of rewards are collected in an inventory.
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Levels unto 30 or 40 and special levels with no bummers
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Info on reward unlock and bummer-free levels
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Collecting the rewards through quit or in-game currencies
​Along with these brainstorming sessions, data analysis from other portfolio games, and user requirements were analyzed.
Defining the Problem
During the discovery phase of the project, we have always kept stakeholders in the loop updating the relevant learnings at each step. This helps to prevent the fatal error of misunderstanding and underestimating ‘Business Viability’.
Design
Understand the challenges
During the development of this feature, we faced several challenges, which helped us to think up and create an amazing feature. Below are some ways we overcame these challenges through design. We worked through this process for quite a few weeks, and I believe I have learned a lot from it.
How to present this whole feature differently with respect to narration, and themes and still incorporate loss aversion?
As a result, the solution was chosen knowing that a substantial amount of time would be needed for the creation and iterate the user experience, concept art setup, ideation, and implementation. Likewise, this had a few risks from the storage point of view and implementation point of view, such as causing lag and making it difficult to download all the assets in a live game.
With all these factors in mind, we cultivated a feature that would allow players to explore,
the main six sections of the factory include 30 levels overall, with engaging gameplay and narrative.
Here is a glimpse of six different sections of the factory in the form of an initial prototype using existing art assets from the game
Here is a glimpse of six different sections of the factory and objects when actual art was completed and animations in place
Design
After a few repetitions will this game/theme bore out? How to make it less repetitive?
This feature can be accessed either by using in-game tokens or by playing one free entry daily. As a result, the whole feature would become repetitive after a while.
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To avoid this situation we designed the entire feature with innovative and themed components. These components can be changed every few weeks or months to bring in freshness and change the components, backgrounds, and pick objects in the game when required.
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We have added up to 30 rewards from all over the game. If a player happens to get all these rewards there would be many edge cases where one of these rewards would complete a challenge in another feature that will overall increase the reward collection flow itself.
Information architecture had to be properly defined.
A process that involves iteration and mindful design is always beneficial. First, we defined the Information Architecture, which included user flows, and properly defined them. To develop a proper IA for the feature, each case was thoroughly tested through a series of steps and iterations.
This helped us solve the problem of tackling edge cases.
Here is a partial IA of the whole feature and figuring out the tasks descriptively
Final Mockups and Visuals
