Wizards of the Coast’s flagship card game “Magic: The Gathering” is full of design inspiration. With the release of their latest card set “Commander Legends” I thought I would write a short article to share some insights I witnessed.
Quick Introduction to Magic The Gathering
Magic the Gathering is a famously successful game where you collect cards to assemble a card pack called a “deck”. There are multiple ways to play the game called “formats”. Each format come with its own sets of rules. Each card can have many lives depending on the format you choose to play. The creators of the game release new sets…
Personality is sometimes used as a tool to better understand players on Just Dance. Here is an example.
What is Just Dance?
Just Dance is a video game where players dance on a mix of hot new songs and good old classics. They use a movement detection device to receive a score for their performance.
Mapping The Player Journey
Just Dance 2018 was thoroughly tested & analyzed, leading to a complete rework of the user interface and onboarding experience in Just Dance 2019.
Using results from user research, designers mapped everything players had to know to enjoy an amazing play experience and worked on how to make that…
Player choices and flexible design can allow two widely different players to enjoy the same game. This is getting increasingly relevant in the era of platform games and the metaverse.
Let’s take difficulty choice for example.
Gamification is one of those cool buzzwords that seem to attract people. Many designers or clients will say they want to do it. As for every cool new tool, there are classic misconceptions about it. Throughout this article I will cover what I think are the important steps to implement gamification in UX Design.
Where to Begin
There are some steps BEFORE adding any kind of game mechanisms:
- Goals Definition: Brand, Business, Users.
- Research, until you have clear behaviors to target.
- Design, to test & implement actual ways to impact behaviors.
- Analyse & Iterate, to constantly monitor your goals & improve.
You define…
Making game is about building an experience, but also about reaching certain performance goals.
Four main goals often come back: Acquisition, engagement, satisfaction and monetization. Monetization being strongly linked to the 3 others.
What are those goals? How do you design for them? Can you maximize all of them and prioritize them correctly?
In this article, we will discuss the first one: acquisition. You can definitely expect me to come back for more.
Acquisition?
Acquisition is about bringing as much people as possible on your game, reaching the widest audience possible.
The very basic choices of your game will have an…
This article is about the user experience in Overwatch and especially the good use of the peak-end rule. At first I wrote that during my free time for some colleagues at Ubisoft, but they told me it would be worth sharing here. Better late than never!
What is Overwatch
Overwatch is the new “hero FPS” by Blizzard. Two teams of 6 players fight over objectives, often the control of an area. Each player has a hero with a unique weapon and some additional skills (run faster, heal everyone around, create a firing turret…).
What is the peak-end rule ?
To make it quick and simple, you experience your life…
Léo Brouard
UX Designer in the video-game industry. Passionate about the use of data to optimize design & strategy. Singing through life, sharing joy and insights.
