The importance of UX design

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Started by Kaelan 1 posts View original ↗
  1. UX, in case you aren't aware, stands for User Experience. It covers everything about the user interacting with your game that doesn't have anything to do with the actual game mechanics.

    This is a huge aspect of pretty much every game, but something a lot of people don't pay attention to. Mike Z (creator of Skullgirls) did a talk recently on how this applies to fighting games, with several in-depth examples:



    (the intro is a bit obnoxious, skip to 01:05 to see the talk)

    Some of it is fighting-game specific, but a lot of it applies to any kind of game, including RPGs. Like in the very first topic he brings up - button config - RPG Maker itself actually does several things you really don't want to subject people to, like having to remember which button means what (C? Z? ...what? where's the confirm button?), on top of picking things out from a drop-down instead of just pressing the button you want to use.

    It also goes over a bunch of other things, like displaying all relevant information (i.e.: several 2P games don't actually keep track of running win/lose counts), not over-complicating inputs (i.e.: there shouldn't be a reason for half-circle inputs to exist, players should rarely have to press more than 2 buttons at the same time - which sounds like mostly a fighting game thing but actually applies to action RPGs too), how characters should react to when they get hit (visually and audibly), and how to properly handle people connecting and disconnecting controllers while they're playing the game.

    Can you think of other similar things that you do in your game to improve it from a user-experience side of things?