What I learnedTwo years into the game's development, I was brought on to the Madlands team to perform a UX triage on the then-current design. The focus of my work would be to transform the game from a portrait layout to a landscape layout and update all the screen layout designs. Then to make the screen flow smoother and more logical. After working on this project for almost a year,
Madlands Mobile was shipped in July 2018 and was sunset a month later, with the whole development team laid-off in Sep 2018. I learned the following things.
- Game Designers and UX Designers are two important parts of the "Product Designer" role in a game project. Game Designer and UX Designers should work closely and value each other's input to this product;
- The team
didn't have a workflow designed for the Game Designers, UX Designers, and Engineers. Game Designers usually skip UX Designers and ask Engineers to do some game design or UI changes. Quick fixes between Game Designers and Engineers can cause a cascade effect.
Everyone needs to see the issue and work together from all sides to address the problem;
Check out the workflow we follow in This Game Studio in my other post.- The change from landscape to portrait needed much more time than it was expected. A good understanding of the scope is essential to product development.