Design Details 294: Designing UX for Games (feat. Tea Chang) (& Endgame Discussion)
This week, we welcome Tea Chang, a UX Designer working on League of Legends at Riot Games, to talk about designing user experiences for gamers. At the end of the show, Tea sticks around for a long, spoiler-filled discussion of Avengers: Endgame. In Follow-up, we read and respond to your feedback regarding the cover art concept from last week. And as always, we share a few cool things, like a video series about movies, some state-specific branding, and a little indie film about superheroes. Spoilers spoilers spoilers. Spoilers.
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Follow-up:
- Last week, we tweeted out a first draft of the new cover art
- Video: "The Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup"
- Brett Yanoski likes the mask idea but thinks the execution needs work
- Ryan Morrison and Luca Orio gave us their seals of approval
- Alex Binder likes the graphic Ds
- Chrish Dunne would prefer a better logotype and more abstract Ds
- Follow us on Twitter and stay tuned for more versions of the cover art
- Mskellybrooks left us a very nice iTunes review
- You can leave one for us, too :)
Interview:
- Check out Tea Chang on Twitter and at her personal site
- League of Legends is a wildly popular multiplayer online battle arena game from Riot Games
- Video: "Playtesting - How to Get Good Feedback on Your Game - Extra Credits"
- Literally unplayable is "an expression—often sarcastic—indicating that a video game is so badly broken that it prevents a player from progressing or enjoying the experience"
- Vivi Rosenstein's stance on assigning blame for suboptimal design has matured over the years
- Banner blindness is "a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information"
- Article: "Get ready to see more ads on Google’s traffic app Waze"
- Adobe XD is "the fastest way to design, prototype, and share any user experience"
- Video: "The Magic of Making Sound" is a great peek into foley, an art which, when done well, goes unnoticed
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild forces you to use a wide range of weapons by making them both easy to find and quick to break
- Video game design is "the process of designing the content and rules of a video game in the pre-production stage"
- Article: "'Mortal Kombat 11' Requires More Than $6,000 to 100%, According to Early Estimates"
- We talked about the interface and game design of Apex Legends on episode 283: Deadly American Idol
- In the gorgeous game Gris, "light puzzles, platforming sequences, and optional skill-based challenges reveal themselves as more of Gris’s world becomes accessible"
- Video: "Portal 2 Intro", in which a tutorial is hidden behind a funny, story-driven calibration test
One Cool Thing:
- Brian shared Patrick H. Willems, a YouTuber who makes videos about movies
- Check out the Patrick Explains series, especially the one about The Fast and the Furious
- Gabriel Valdivia introduced Brian to the channel
- Tea shared the team page for Mayor Pete Buttigieg, which has some really nice branding for each US state
- Shepard Fairey is famous for his Obama Hope poster (and the Obey clothing brand)
- Marshall shared Avengers: Endgame and discussed it with Tea and Brian in a segment called...
Endgame Discussion:
!!! SPOILERS !!!
- Video: "Every Avengers: Endgame Easter Egg", in which 209 easter eggs are enumerated
- Video: "Rocky Training" is the prototypical montage sequence showing a protagonist's improvement over time
- The Dark Night of the Soul is "a moment, usually at the end of the second act of a three-act story, where all seems lost and the protagonist must confront 'a collapse of perceived meaning'"
- r/inthesoulstone
!!! SPOILERS !!!
Design Details on the Web:
- We are @designdetailsfm
- Brian is @brian_lovin and hi@brianlovin.com
- Marshall is @marshallbock
- @Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
- Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes
BYEEEEE!