Please have a look at this Miro board for a more detailed overview of my UX Design and Production process.
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
“Simple rules lead to complex behaviour. Complex rules lead to stupid behaviour.”
“A build says more than a thousand words.”
- Research phase: Based on the briefing, I begin with researching the genre, context, and audience. Deliverables vary but often include market analysis and feature comparisons.
- Initial concept: This step focuses on the core game/interaction loop and the meta-game layers supporting the core. The brief concept provides enough input for a first round of feedback.
- Instead of writing long documents I use collaborative whiteboards like Miro to create flowcharts, wireframes and mock-ups. The mixture of high level flowchart and wireframe visualises the game loop screen by screen. Publishers, developers, project managers, designers find the wireframes much more helpful than written documentation at this stage.
- Low-fi prototyping: Paper prototypes, LEGO bricks, Figma click dummies … anything to get a first interactive experience of the core game loop is much more helpful than any static documentation.
- I extend the flowcharts and wireframes based on feedback. They can now be used as a basis to define the feature set.
- Now an iterative specification phase follows. There is no one-fits-all-template at this stage since every game project is different and demands different deliverables at different stages during the development process.
- Ongoing documentation. You can find more information in this post.
Throughout the development process the Game Designer is the go-to person for the rest of the team. In the nitty-gritty of daily development requirements and realities change all the time, many new decisions have to be made and old decisions remembered and re-assessed.