Posted March 13, 2020 by Kez
#Game Design #2D #Mystery #Experimental #First Person #Story Rich #Playtesting #Solo Dev #Design Process #Process
Last week saw the overhaul of The Arcadia Report: taking it from a collection of mysterious features and a loose alpha prototype to a streamlined redesign. The whole process is broken down in last week’s dev log, now it’s on to phase 2: a fresh introduction.
This week was where the rubber hit the road in terms of the redesign. It wasn’t just about streamlining the experience on paper and creating examples but actually mapping out the onboarding/tutorial case to an entirely new design (with some substantial improvements to the case along the way), ticking off the areas that still needed revised, and playtesting.
That also meant diving into some of the nitty gritty details now that the broad brush strokes were in place. In practice that meant reading lots about dark mode and playing around with subtle colour changes. The result? Along with the UX, the mini-design system has an updated colour palette and levels system for a much more satisfying dark UI. To read more about that process, check out the full breakdown here.
With those pieces in place, I could bring the newly redesigned onboarding to life and put it all together in a prototype for people to test. From last week’s sprint, I already had the ground works for what I was designing, why, and what to test. The theory was that recentring around a more visual, location-based experience will reduce complexity, removing intimidation and confusion.
Questions to be Answered:
Test Scenario:
I’m taking advantage of a free trial on lookback.io to allow for some remote, unmoderated testing which will hopefully get a nice wide range of feedback. So far that, I’m aiming for a simple and straightforward task to see how the new design fares when users are left to their own devices:
Imagine you’ve just downloaded The Arcadia Report and are starting it up for the first time. Follow the instructions and attempt to start up Arcadia.
Metrics:
The Results:
Tests are still in progress and naturally different areas I will need to look into further are being highlighted but so far, all signs point to a win with 100% of users successfully completing the task on their own.
With the introductory case complete and the new design heading in the right direction, I’m feeling like calling January a ‘turning point’ in the project was more than hyperbole-for-the-sake-of-blog-post-titles. Next week, the goal is to continue testing in hopes of making Arcadia 2.0 the best it can be. For my core hours, I’m looking forward to continuing this fresh exploration of the content by diving back into the first murder mystery and bringing it to life in a week long sprint dedicated to revising the content. Time to get back to post-its and string because an evidence wall is on its way!
Until next time, stay safe.
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