UX Design

While some casual games have pretty sophisticated production pipelines, my time working with one company forced me to look at designing in a very restricted space. While not ideal, I think this is healthy for designers from time to time. While this specific situation was additionally frustrating due to process and structure issues, it forced me to look at gaming through the eyes of a different audience than I was used to while taking a very minimalistic approach.

Instead of focusing on new and creative ideas, my time was spent focusing on every interactive element and movement on screen. These could be broken down into beats that all have purpose and polish. Sometimes I was designing reward flows. Other times it was focusing on eye travel and priority-of-read. Every action and transition could be vetted to improve timing or made more intuitive to help the user keep a low friction ‘flow’ through the game.

Interactive Design

Additionally, at a different company, I spent a great deal of time in high-level design and prototyping. I really enjoy the fast speed, low friction space that more casual games can capture in early development. (Given the right culture and environment). This can be a great space to iterate quickly and have a lot of fun in design.

I rapidly put together decks that captured core design and basic meta around an idea. Pitches like this are rapidly iterated on and collaborated around. From there, paired up with a good proto engineer, we would stand up demos that proved the foundations of the core game loop. The team was very fast and small. Sometimes just two of us (designer and engineer). Occasionally some additional assistance might grow the team to 3-5 for a short cycle.

Core concepts would be stood up and playable in a matter of a few weeks. The team could play and show the demo, proving out the flow or fun in the core loop. This was the first step before driving forward into early production.

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