• How to build Mobile Games with people in Mind
  • Author: Player Research
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: hanliuxin5
  • Proofread by: Potpot, Quorafind

User experience design principles to help you build the games people want. From Seb Long, Harvey Owen and Gareth Lloyd.

As the audience for mobile games continues to expand globally. As a result, developers not only have to satisfy the tastes of various gamers, but also strive to create a good user experience to make their games stand out in a competitive market. The complexity of the challenge is that no matter how good your intentions are, sometimes the user experience of a mobile game is not what it was designed to be. There are a number of reasons that are subtle and rooted in the players themselves that explain why these things happen. And the most subtle of these differences are within people; The influencing factors are, for example, how your players see, know, feel, and engage with your game.

We’re from Player Research, experts in game testing and user Research. Google Play invites us to use our experience evaluating hundreds of games to establish a set of principles that can help you create an engaging, easy-to-learn, and rewarding game for all players. Applying these principles to your evaluation will help you identify risks, flaws, and failures in your user experience. Adhering to these principles in development increases player engagement and motivation, makes the game easier to pick up and play. Of course, this requires some psychological trickery in the design.

These principles and questions are put together so you can consult your audience, discuss them as a team, or guide you through playtesting. These questions may not be detailed, but they should prompt the team to identify differences between the design and the player experience.

We’ve broken these ux principles down into two main areas:

  • Breaking down barriers: Remove hidden “barriers to fun” by following the way players see, hear, think, participate in and live with the game.
  • Architecture: By designing a game that can be learned to help the player understand, master, and progress, it clearly shows the progress and depth of the player’s understanding.

By addressing these issues, you can ensure that challenges, setbacks, and dilemmas in your game are expected and not unintended consequences of design decisions.

Break down barriers

How does the player see, hear, think, engage with the game and live with it

The first principle requires that you consider the physical and mental endurance of your players; And whether your players can enjoy your game as part of their daily lives. Games that don’t follow this rule will soon be uninstalled. Some players, when they first start playing, are immediately frustrated or confused, or there is something that prevents them from understanding the game, and they are unlikely to open your game again: “I might not be right for this game”.

Take a look at how your game welcomes newcomers. It’s not that you have to bend to what the player wants, or that you have to make the game less challenging or sacrifice complexity. Chances are your game is already hardcore, [but] it’s a good idea to rethink these issues. – Rami, Ismail, Vlambeer (source)

Principle 1: Suitable complexity

Complexity is not just something you put into your game design; As well as the player’s feelings, complexity arises from the chemistry between the game design and the player’s capabilities. Maybe you know your game very well; But the player’s cognitive, motor, and perceptual abilities are not necessarily as good as yours. Your target audience — regardless of age or experience — will have an acceptable upper limit to the game’s complexity. Unless these limits are designed with these in mind, games can quickly become overly complex or demanding.

Design-appropriate complexity means knowing who your audience is and their cross-functional abilities, such as memory, attention, language, and motor skills. These functional areas work smoothly in parallel, allowing us to do all of our daily tasks at the same time, or to focus on a single area to solve new or particularly demanding tasks. However, high demands in any one area can lead to reduced capabilities in other areas; High demands on multiple areas are ideal for poorly performed and difficult to understand games. So, evaluate the needs of your game in terms of these different areas. What changes can be made to meet their needs? Can complexity be reduced without affecting the core game experience?

By understanding the relationship between a player’s abilities and their needs, games can be designed to suit any target audience. Here are some questions you can use to assess a game’s fitness complexity:

Some questions about your players

  • What are the visual, motor and cognitive abilities of our target audience?
  • How does our target audience differ in language and numeracy?

Some questions for your team

  • How do we ensure that our games are easy to pick up and play, and that we have considered the best challenge for our target audience based on their current visual, motor and cognitive abilities?
  • Should we adjust our gaming experience to accommodate differences in abilities
  • How early should we get people into the game to test their experience?
  • How can we avoid “complex and variable requirements” in game development?

Ask your players

  • Have you ever been confused while playing a game?
  • When you play a game, do you feel like you have all the information you need to know? Do you know where to find it?
  • Could you tell me how to find [features] in the menu? Can you use menus easily?
  • Did you find the game “right for you”? Is this designed for you? If not, who is it for?

Principle 2: Flexible design

Designing your game for your target audience is a great place to start. But no matter how well you do it, there will always be differences between your players in terms of their experience, preferences, and environment. Accepting the differences in your target audience is just as important as defining your audience.

Games are part of People’s Daily lives, so if possible, they should be designed to be flexible enough to adapt to the different environments in which they are played. The real world is full of interruptions, whether you turn on your device or not. To make your game fit into people’s lives, make sure it supports flexible play times, customizable controls and audiovisual Settings, and can adapt to the fragmented pace of play.

For example, the built-in feature in Hearthstone can handle long absences:

Players who have been away from Hearthstone for a while will often come back thinking they were awesome, and teaching them the game again will feel like a waste of time and an insult to their intelligence. Instead, we provided quick pop-ups that let them know what changes were made to the current game, as well as unique daily tasks to guide them back to the hotel. — John Hopson, Senior User Research Manager, Blizzard Entertainment

Here are some questions to help you evaluate your game’s flexibility:

Some questions about your players

  • When, where and on what devices do our players play?
  • What aspects of the game might affect the gameplay?
  • Do our estimated playing time match up with how the player actually looks when playing? Does it fit in with their real lives?
  • Do we give enough time to perceive and understand player feedback?

Some questions for your team

  • How do we get players to apply their personalized experience to their daily preferences and features, such as providing video and audio Settings?
  • Do we need to design games to be interruptible?
  • What about older players who return to the game after a long absence?
  • Is there a scientific way to play the game, such as having them hit a button in the upper left corner of the screen with their right hand while holding the device in both hands?
  • Do we give players the option to “hang up”, hide or turn off features that are not core game mechanics?

Ask your players

  • How often are you interrupted while playing the game?
  • What happens when your game is interrupted and you come back? Is that what you expect to happen? If not, why not?
  • Did you change anything about the game?
  • Do you want to change anything about the game or how it works?

Tectonic system

Help the player understand, master and progress

While it’s important to address potential barriers to play, the player experience also plays a role in turning new players into veterans and enthusiasts. By emphasizing learnability and the interconnectedness of features in your game, you can teach your players knowledge and skills about the game and guide them on the journey of your design. Eventually, they will play the game the way you want them to play.

Principle 3: The power of familiarity

Players can easily learn features of a game if they are already known in some way: a system or a popular standard, for example, or if they are identical to the real world. Players can identify similar playthrough strategies, such as getting a certain score before unlocking the next stage. Use widely recognized images and behaviors from the real world, such as pulling and firing slingshots. When designing games based on familiarity, players can make effective, enlightening guesses about game elements, features, or interactions.

Familiarity can also come from internal consistency. As the player spends more and more time in the game, the visual representation becomes familiar and recognizable. Associating consistent graphics, terminology, and color representations with game characteristics can help players build strong game thinking. Maintaining this consistency will help players anticipate new features and features of the game without explicitly teaching them the steps.

Understanding and responding to the expectations of our players is Paramount when designing King’s user experience. All products have to have their context, and our players have evolved to recognize and predict answer boards in mobile games. Uphold those expectations (and know when to break them!). By helping us create an enjoyable gaming experience, players can focus on the fun with minimal cognitive cost. — Caitlin Goodale, User experience Designer, King

Some questions about your players

  • What are the norms and expectations of players regarding game mechanics?

Some questions for your team

  • Is the user interface consistent with the player’s existing mental model?
  • How can we use our players’ real-world knowledge to make our game mechanics, features, and interactions more intuitive and understandable?
  • How can we make our game mechanics, features and interactions more intuitive and easy to understand by keeping other aspects of our game consistent? Or other people’s games that we gamers play?
  • Can we ensure that our images and terms are unique and quickly recognizable?

Ask your players

  • What do you think these ICONS mean at first sight?
  • How do you envision this feature working?
  • Does this feature live up to your expectations? If not, why not?
  • Did anything in the game not work the way you expected?
  • Have you seen any of these features in other games?

Principle 4: Appropriate help

New players often come to a game with the mindset of trying it out, even if they don’t fully understand it. Active players learn by playing, trial and error.

But there is a price to be paid for effective gaming through independent exploration; Since the player is constantly interacting with the game without even knowing it, comprehensive feedback systems and safeguards are necessary. In order to learn the game, players need comprehensive, relevant, and timely feedback to understand the impact of their actions on the game world.

Learning how to play through self-discovery is much more effective when the player is in a safe environment. The emphasis here should be on practice, perhaps through the appropriate concept of “chunking” games to get the game into the approachable trial-and-error phase. It should also allow players to recover from mistakes, whether through game mechanics or other means — such as being generous with resources early in the game or offering options that allow players to undo their actions while learning how to play.

Players who are confused or simply want to know more can also provide additional information: a “get more” help tip, an “info” button, or even a comprehensive game manual or customer support contact information. However, try to avoid relying on these methods as the only way players will understand your game. While the how-to guide for each game is different, it’s best to let the player learn how to play the game while playing it.

Some questions about your players

  • Are your players more likely to learn by exploring the game or by relying on help?

Some questions for your team

  • What is the ideal time and place to provide support information to players?
  • What can players do wrong in our games that they shouldn’t, and how can we protect them from such negative experiences?
  • How does our gameplay feedback better communicate its impact on the game world to the player?

Ask your players

  • Have you made any mistakes from which you can’t recover? If so, what happened?
  • Do you tend to figure out how to play these games yourself? Can you do that in this game?
  • Have you ever seen any help messages in the game while playing? Have you listened to them? Do they work?
  • Did you go further and ask for help or information on how to play the game? Where do you expect to find this information?
  • Do you feel like you know if you’re good or bad at the game?

Principle 5: Lean tutorials

In a world where teaching based on player intuition, familiarity, and trial and error has failed, the game needs to explain itself clearly. Tutorials, text prompts, and the “click next” method are common teaching methods.

Relying too heavily on tutorials to memorize too much can overwhelm the player, or stifle the player with a rigid experience. However, in the absence of other ways for players to learn how to play the game, the absence of tutorials is likely to drive players away.

Playtesting and iterative design can help define the “Goldilocks Principles” tutorial for your audience: teach your players about the basic concepts and features of your game in moderation, while balancing the cost of learning with familiarity, intuition, and some assistance.

Some questions about your players

  • Are your players likely to be particularly resistant to tutorials?

Some questions for your team

  • Does our UI accurately communicate the game to the player?
  • Can players recognize our gameplay feedback and respond to it as we want it to?
  • Which areas need more or fewer tutorials?
  • Do we do our best to teach players (e.g. through loading screens, pause menus, menu interactions, videos or cutscenes)?
  • Are we using tutorials in the right places?

Ask your players

  • Did the tutorial make you feel comfortable learning a new game?
  • Do you think tutorials in games are silly? Are there times when you prefer to learn how to play on your own?
  • Can you understand each tutorial? Did you manage to learn quickly what it was trying to teach you?

Principle 6: Clear depth

Once your players have the basics, then what?

A clear goal gives the player a meaning to the game, something to work for, and a reason to come back. The purpose of the game is communicated through the game’s architecture and the depth of its metagame — fostering confidence in the game, rewarding mechanisms and encouraging retention.

Communicating to the player how a deeper metagame relates to the core game system is often a challenge, and the outcome is often determined by the tenuous, abstract relationship between the two. Many games rely on familiar mechanics to communicate their basic system and progression, such as “collect 3 stars” and “complete the last level before continuing the adventure”.

Rewards can also be used to represent metagame systems; But like game goals, they need to be clearly understood by the player. A misunderstood reward can confuse rather than reinforce the player’s understanding of how the game is progressing.

Players from other places can also provide a source of depth to the game, and potentially an endless metagame. Social interaction and competition between players — through leaderboards, player-to-player, co-op modes, “clans”, social sharing or just chatting — can allow players to engage in incredible ways, which can be a source of potentially infinite depth. However, these approaches can be difficult to implement: not only because of the technical requirements involved, but how multiplayer and social interaction should complement the game’s stand-alone content and mechanics.

These UX problems that need to be solved are not only challenging but also serious, because a great metagame means long-term engagement for the audience. Effectively representing the metagame system ensures that players can make confident and informed decisions about in-game purchases, and increases the likelihood that players will spend more game time before unloading. This is also true outside of freemium: a good metagame means a chance for another player to be captured later in your business.

Some questions about your players

  • Do your players choose games with long-term goals?
  • To what extent will players seek out these types of games because of their social nature? Do they want to play with other players or against other players?

Some questions for your team

  • Do we present our long-term goals in an understandable way?
  • How do we meaningfully communicate the presence of other real players and how do we integrate multiplayer and social interaction into our metagame?
  • How can we strengthen the relationship between game progression and metagame progression?
  • What features are designed to keep the player coming back to the game and show them something meaningful in their first experience?

Ask your players

  • How do you progress with this game?
  • What do you want to do with this game now?
  • What do you need to do in this game (in the long run)?
  • How did you get better with this game?
  • Will the game get harder?
  • Can you interact with other people in this game? How do you feel?
  • What can you buy in this game? Can you buy something to help you?
  • Did you pay for anything in this game? How can you get more?

To highlight

Right balance

We’ve discussed several ways to make a game intuitive and understandable without increasing its complexity. But remember, no one wants a boring, boring, boring game. Successful games challenge players and provide them with a sense of accomplishment.

As a creative game developer, you can ignore any of these principles in the name of fun. Many successful games have complex visuals, awkward controls, unfamiliar worlds, and so on. In some cases, intentional complexity and unpleasantries can be a unique “source of challenge” for a game.

However, ignoring (or assuming) these principles increases the risk that your game will have meaningless obstacles, and will add unexpected unpleasantness to the player’s experience. In short: choose your battles wisely, and make sure your game only plays the way you want it to.

We hope that incorporating these player-centric design principles into your development discussions will help ensure that the game experience you design meets expectations. Careful and thoughtful experimentation with these visual, motor, cognitive, and fundamental human design considerations will increase the chances that players will find the fun you’ve created for them and come back for more.

In future articles, we will share the results of our work with game developers who have applied these principles to their game designs.

What do you think?

Have you ever thought about the user experience of designing games in the past and how human factors have influenced the behavior of game players? Leave a comment below this post or tweet with the hashtag #AskPlayDev and we’ll respond via @Googleplaydev (where we’ll show tips for success in the Google App Store).

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