I was so excited to return back to Nanyang Polytechnic, School of Digital Media Design - Games to share my career experience, together with Chun You Sim! Never had I thought that I am able to come back to the lecture hall as a speaker!
My aim was to enlighten the students about the potential and career opportunities in UI/UX that are not just confine to games! I wished I had more time to prepare my talk more effectively, but I am glad they still managed to get something out of it! Most of the slides are confidential, so I would not be showing any slide online! I might share some day if the confidentiality agreement got lifted!
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World Strand Tour event was a short but amazing experience! Finally get the chance to meet with Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa! They shared their design thinking process of creating their world vision and giving user an experience of connected-ness. It is fruitful to understand how they are able to see and design this gaming experience. The host did the great job in entertaining and used a lot of game referencing in a humor way. The best part is to take photo with the Two Legends, Hideo Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa! I did not managed to buy their shirt, but I got myself a keychain and a tote bag!
Great thanks to PlayStation Asia for hosting such as memorable event! UXSEA Summit Workshop was a blast! For those who do not know what event it is, UXSEA Summit is a unique UX Design event bringing UX enthusiasts together from all over Southeast Asia. This knowledge sharing and networking event deliver immense benefits to the Industry by scaling beyond Interface Design and addressing end-to-end experiences with a flavor of Southeast Asia! From my knowledge, the event held every year in Singapore. It was an eye opener to learn from UX Experts on their methodology of doing their storytelling, identifying opportunities and user research. It is something relatable yet has a different perspective compared to Game UX. I can also get to connect with a huge range of UI and UX Designer from different industries. It is a pity that I would not be able to go for the remaining 2 days due to work, but I will definitely attend it next year! I will end my post with their highlight video! I was asked to help the Ravenhill team temporary while working with the Manastorm team. The main contribution is to improve the screen's readability and to ease the player experience. A brief description about Ravenhill: it is a free-to-play hidden object game which you have to solve the mystery of a once-flourishing city that suddenly become a ghost town. As a seeker, you will be entrusted with preventing an unknown catastrophe! Free Ravenhill from mysterious force before it is too late! MyTona has a very successful hidden object game called Seekers Notes: Hidden Mystery. The same team see as an opportunity to create a brand new hidden object game for casual players. Here are some works I had contributed as a UX Designer: The goal is to make the window more friendly to the casual players without breaking any information into different tab and screens. It was a good challenge for me to experiment with different layouts, organizing and prioritizing information.
Sadly, it was a short and temporary task for me, since my main focus is on Manastorm project. I believe I would be able to improve and broaden my understanding if I am able to know the players' behaviors and feedback when interacting with my wireframes. Overall, it is always refreshing for me to step in and contribute on different projects. Download Ravenhill game now! IOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id1399339172 Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mytona.rh Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZCV3WCN Manastorm: Arena of Legends is a real time strategy game in Early Access. The game is still in soft-launch and we are doing our best to improve and provide the best experience to our players. We have a lot of plans for the game and we are counting on your support and feedback. I was officially in the team in Mid 2018, when the game had been developed for a year and was in its Beta stage. My role was to improve their UI style, layout and screen flow without much interference of the development time. I did an internal presentation about "UI Methodology of Manastorm" during MyTonaCon 2019 on the 13th June. It took me a month to prepare! Overall it was a nice exercise for me to write out my thinking design vividly and share it to everyone. Here are some of the slides that I can reveal online: To my surprise, I won in the "Game Design" category! If a stage fright and poor speaker like me able to do it, you can do it too! 💪 To be honest, I was nervous and looked at my script most of the time. But in the end, I am glad I was able to conquer my own fear! I realized when I am out there with a main focus of sharing what I think is important, I was able to put aside my fear and being with the people around me. Here's a video of the Manastorm exhibition show! I was amazed how it turned out. My best moment to come to Russia, Yakutsk is to meet my teammates! We had been communicated one another through messages or video call. I do not know how they look like and their personalities until I was able to talk to them face to face.
Manastorm Team is by far my favorite game development team. They are humble, open-minded, professional and fun to work with. Even though we work together in different countries, I feel connected to them. They have my respect. Hope we continue to grow and be even awesome together.
On the 29-31 March 2019, I attended Global Service Jam 2019. In every year, Jammers over 80 cities globally will participate and create service prototype in just 48 hours. It was a brand new experience by applying UX skill into Service Design.
This 2 days global jam broaden my knowledge and thinking about UX. And our team managed to win for doing qualitative research and test proven prototype! We have restless and frustration moments but we managed to pull it off in the end! Love this feeling of teamwork!
After the event, I had managed to compile all our works, process and thoughts into a digital pitch deck.
​Great thanks to Carousell for hosting the event! and Thanks to my teammates Yvonne Liew (our leader), Mai Kanapornchai, Siok Kia Tan & Kyu Lim! UX Design Lessons on November 2018 to January 2019! I was given an opportunity to conduct lessons within the company. Since the company headquarter is in Russia while I am in Singapore, we decide to use Google Meet as our communication platform. It was a new experience for me to plan the lesson structure, work together with a Russian translator, checking assignments and giving feedback. All colleagues, including myself, were taking up this program outside of our working hours. Therefore, I make sure the lessons and assignments are light but essential for them. I also make sure that this course content is being simplified so that everyone will be able to learn right from the beginning. At any point of time, I would need to be flexible and tweak our schedule and syllabus according to their needs. The slides and lesson videos are confidential so I would not be sharing online. I can share some of the summaries here. Course Syllabus: Lesson 1 - Understanding UI and UX Design Lesson 2 - Researching and Creating Personas Lesson 3 - Analyzing Competitors Lesson 4 - User Journey Lesson 5 - Speed Prototyping Lesson 6 - Basics of UI Design Lesson 7 - Usability Testing Lesson 8 - Team Presentation There are total of 4 assignments and 1 Project assignment for basic hand-on experience. Templates and samples are provided to make things easier to star with. I recommend the participants to do as a team and use their current game project when doing their assignments. All assignments would be reviewed to bring them to the next level. It was fun to see each team creativity and approach when reviewing their assignments. On the final lesson, 3 teams made it through and present all their assignments. A colleague in Russia compiled their presentations and our interviews into a video. I appreciated this effort a lot; we can see the overview of our 2 months efforts put to good use for the company. I used my weekends to do this project, and now that I think about it, I felt worthwhile. Here are some screenshots from the video: I am glad that despite our on-going game projects, I have a great support team and colleagues who actively participated in this lecture. I had learnt a lot from their feedback too. And finally, Great thanks to MyTona for this opportunity.
I got to go to Casual Connect at Shenzhen on 12-14 November 2018!
Casual Connect is an online platform that enables individuals to network with experts and professionals from diverse industries. They conduct events in the casual game industry every year in different countries. In addition, they conduct conferences, showcases, and awards ceremonies for firms in the casual games industry. It was a good experience connecting to business people, publishers, indie developers and locals. I had learnt to use words like “休闲游戏 (Casual Games)”, “开发者 (Developer)” and “出版商 (Publisher)” instead of speaking in English. Thank you MyTona and Casual Connect for this rare opportunity. Here are some photos taken from MyTona! And Check out their Instagram video too! After working and leaving many indie studio due to financial issue, I decided that Smashingclicks will be my last indie studio. I enjoyed working in a small studio because of its flexible roles and taking the responsibilities of the game. I joined in on June 2015 while they were developing a Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) prototype. They had successful MMO facebook games (sadly I forgot the names) and they want to upgrade their engine and create new MMO game for mobile devices. Here are some screenshots they used to create for facebook games: For the past one year, we had been working from home and meet up once a month. It was very flexible yet challenging for me to have work-life balance while having the integrity of getting the work done. We start by testing prototypes of players interacting with isomeric environment. Our first prototype was a simple tiling method. Though the prototype did well in terms of optimizing, we found the overall universe too boring to look at, let alone playing it. Our next prototype goal is to enhance the visual look of the environment while using the same tiling method. Dofus game was our main inspiration and we did a lot of tiling research. Their environment look natural despite using repeated tiles and we decide to explore deeper into getting this result. Below are some prototype environments I produced using our tiling editor: Beside environments, I did sketching for character and monsters. Previously, the characters are done and animated in 6 different views (top, top-left, top-right, bottom, bottom-left and bottom-right). The result was too rigid and tedious. We end up going for the easiest and smartest way; by creating a "fake" 3/4 view of both characters and monsters. We tested with a few users and it turned out a lot better compared to the previous method. We originally want to make spine animation as we thought it is easy, smoother, flexible and cost less memory. However, when comparing my spine and my sprite animation, the sprite animation look a lot more lively. Perhaps I need more practice in doing spine animation D: Our team were having fun experimenting, testing and finding out new results. We were doing good process until something unexpected happened. Our investors decide to pause our MMO project and wanted us to create a hyper-casual game within 3 months! We were definitely shocked. But thankfully, our team were able to react professionally and finding ways to play smart to overcome this situation. After our meeting, I quickly created a pitch deck for our new game. I reused some sprites as placeholder for visual purpose. At this point of time, we want to have the main game mechanic right. Here are some samples of the pitch deck: We did several variations before we decide on "one tap" mechanic which the player just smash (tap furiously) on the screen. We keep the art style simple and appealing for younger audience, as well as to make it achievable within the remaining 2 months. And since the players are going to tap furiously, our monsters animation does not require a lot of sprites for visual feedback. We managed to complete the game in two months, and for the remaining one month, we focus on marketing (both social media and physical booth) and publishing the game. It was a new and fun experience for us. I get to interact with our potential players; receive feedback and behavior when playing our game. I also learnt basic marketing such as A/B Testing. Even though our game does not meet the Key Performer Indicator (KPI) and the investors decided to withdraw, both the investors and our team are aware that we put efforts to make things possible. I am glad to say that this is my best (and final) experience working in an indie studio. Even though we are no longer working together, we still hang out once a while as friends! And finally here is our video trailer done by our artist, Ryan! Check out Smashing Heroes! App: https://appadvice.com/app/smashing-heroes/1149018238 Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/smashingheroes/ |
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