THE SITUATION

After uncovering issues in the design and with the emergence of financially successful mobile puzzle games such as Puzzles & Dragons and Candy Crush, a decision was made by the company stakeholders to abandon development of the fantasy card video game called Final War to develop a new product seizing opportunities in the mobile marketplace.

THE BRIEF

After much debate, the company stakeholders decided we would create an original midcore mobile puzzle game for iOS, Android and Facebook platforms which would encourage repeat play and utilize game mechanics which drive monetization through microtransactions.

THE CHALLENGES

Internal Challenges

For years the Final War projects had been at a virtual standstill with various issues in design and failures within the company. To turn the situation around, we needed to address the following key issues;

• Define the product vision, scope, and business objectives.

• Define the most valuable features for the player to determine which would make up the product MVP.

• Generate enthusiasm within the studio about the new project.

• Create a better development & production process.

• Remove development impediments.

• Find a way to get early feedback on prototypes without having to build a polished version.

• Reduce crippling scope creep.

• Produce a shippable minimal viable product.

Product Challenges

• Meet expectations of stakeholders some of which have a personal attachment to the IP.

• Breakthrough marketplace noise.

• Offer players something other than a clone of an existing game.

• Engage high fantasy fans and convert them to paying players.

• Design mechanisms to encourage repeat play.

• Implement a form of social/ multiplayer gaming.

• A high amount of custom art.

MY ROLE

Lead/ Producer: Simply do what ever it takes to get a product over the line into the marketplace.

Experience Strategy & Vision

Create user journeys, wireframes, IA, animations, videos, and prototypes to share the games vision, design principles and content strategy across each platform. Developing these artifacts helped sell ideas, gain alignment across the company and drive decision making.

Planning & Scope Definition

Define the product, balancing customer needs and business objectives — prioritized and negotiated features for MVP and beyond.

Design Execution & Validation

The game was designed for Facebook, iOS and Android devices with a scalable AWS backend across various regions to improve player performance. Each platform had its user journey validated via various UX research methods and was UAT tested.

STRATEGY

• Define the business objectives and positioning with stakeholders.

• Define the features and the value of those features to determine which would make up the product MVP.

• Create a feasible roadmap which would see the product MVP complete and shipped on time.

• Production management and KPI's.

• Define the product UX through the use of various use cases, user journeys, personas, IA and wireframes which can be used by the entire team maximizing effectiveness in development.

• Increase the flow and transparency of information across the team.

• Drive and facilitate the interaction between various departments working on the project.

• Identify talent & skills across the organization which could be used to accelerate production.

• Meet milestones and get to the marketplace in a timely fashion.

PRODUCT VISION

After getting the team excited over the new product and completing the initial game design, UX research, product backlog and visual design direction stakeholders hijacked the product and transformed into a Final War product which would reuse existing story/ lore and art assets to save money and help justify earlier expenditure on the abandoned project. This stakeholder decision to shoehorn Final War elements into the game had many negative repercussions on the team and the product.

In the end, the product vision provided by stakeholders was a poorly defined multi-puzzle high fantasy card game with no clear player demographic apart from high fantasy fans.

The team responded well to this challenge putting ideas & energy forward to improve the game and make it a success.

PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS

Supported Platforms

• iOS and Android (Phone & tablets)

  • iPhone 5.

  • iPhone 6.

  • iPad 2 and above.

  • Galaxy s4 and above.

• Facebook web version of the game.

GAME KEY FEATURES

RETROSPECTIVE

The company was new to software development and the best practices associated with development: the lack of understanding of the product, the inability to focus on the core experience and the companies tradition of working in a structured waterfall approach hindered production. Meetings would dive deep into the details without having a studied macro view of the project and priorities. This approach from stakeholders resulted in constant changes and scope creep which impeded the project from moving forward.

Compounding the issue was the desire to try and have everything figured out perfectly before teams would commit to moving forward with the work. For each feature phase, I would need to go through multiple cycles of requirements, consensus, approvals, detailed specs and handoff processes. This approach tied with indecision and scope creep from stakeholders generated a ridiculous documentation overhead and ground production to a halt.

In an attempt to fix the issues and produce a better product I tried to implement Scrum. To my surprise, while most of the concepts were received positively, the actual process was not popular with all involved as it affected middle management roles and was not adopted. Even though scrum was rejected, I still managed to implement parts of an agile process and switch the focus of production to be software driven which ultimately resulted in the project being completed and shipped.

The three most transformational elements of the new process were standup meetings for all departments; a prioritize product backlog which helped address scope creep and a feature based wiki page which flourished with developers contributing to the general documentation, specific feature documentation as well as generating development and game design ideas.

Custom Art

Due to the amount of custom art used in the game build size became a severe issue. To overcome this, we used texture packer and also developed custom tools which allowed the use of alternative image formats to reduce the build size and clever image loading techniques so the game would play without any visible delay or lag.

The development and use of these techniques made it possible to meet the initial downloadable build size limit and with some crafty trickery allowed users to seamlessly load assets and download the additional parts of the game in the background without interrupting the player's experience.

CUSTOM CROPPING TOOL

This simple custom tool allowed artists to frame and crop art within the Unity editor so the could see the final result in-game. This tool was crucial to re-purpose artworks which for our game.

CUSTOM GUI EDITOR

Due to the poor GUI system Unity offered at the time and the lack of a viable 3rd party alternative which suited our needs the decision was made to develop custom tools.

The GUI tool developed was a powerful UI system and event notification framework which provided full support for iOS, Android, web player, web GL and Windows platforms.

GUI TOOL FEATURES

• Flexible event system.

• Make complex UIs that take only 1 draw call

• Import Photoshop files and automatically build them as gui in the Unity editor.

• Automatically create atlases, update/modify them at will, or import an atlas from the Texture Packer.

• Support for lighting, normal mapping.

• Support for clipped panels with hard or soft edges.

• An assortment of scripts to help design, layout and edit UI.

• Simple built-in transition animation system.

• Clean, simple and extensively optimized C# code.

UX/UI PROCESS

The documentation required the most rework during the project and was the highest overhead to maintain. In the early stages, I focused only on representing the highest risk areas of the design and later focused on completing the remains areas.

I found that creating video demos, wireframes and artifacts were the most effective tools to gain meaningful feedback from the team, the consensus from stakeholders and approval from senior leadership. 

Also, complementary documentation to communicate animation and timing keyframes were very useful in keeping implementation times down and implementation fidelity high.

I also made changes to my UX/UI process which involved sketching and white‐boarding concepts and flows. Initially, I would directly translate them into hi‐fidelity design comps, but due to the lack of repeat design patterns and volume of screens, we changed the production process so the hi-fidelity design work was passed to an artist who would become the UI specialist.

OUTCOME

Final War: 5 Dragons. A fantasy card battle game, where combat is decided through a classic turn-based puzzle.

postmortem

The team did well under trying conditions and produced the best product possible under the circumstances. All aspects of the stakeholder brief were met, and the game did generate some revenue but due to lack of marketing, steep difficulty curve, lack of depth the game didn't take off. All these issues were uncovered and raised early in the process through a prepared business case but were largely ignored by stakeholders who did not know who the real audience was and the type of game they would like playing.

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