Dumb Ways: Free for All
Responsibilities:
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Leading a team of four designers through launch and live-ops updates.
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Working closely with the leads of art, production and engineering to refine processes and ship the game under a strict deadline.
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Designing and iterating on the multiplayer scoring system.
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Consistent playtesting, bug tracking and pacing tweaks of moment-to-moment gameplay.
Case Study: Improving Multiplayer UX Clarity
Taking over the responsibility of lead designer late in its development, I had to take a measured, pragmatic approach to pitching new features in Dumb Ways: Free for All. This fresh perspective allowed me to view the state of the project at a high-level and identify key areas that needed improvement before the game shipped, for example; the clarity of the mutliplayer scoring system.
The sheer variety of 100 minigames in DW: FFA meant that the final scores achieved at the end of a minigame could be vastly different. To counteract this causing an imbalance in multiplayer, each player was ranked based on their score in that minigame and given a "leaderboard score" separate to the figure they had actually achieved during the minigame.
I noted during user-testing that the presentation of these two seperate scoring values proved incredibly confusing to players, and they would routinely not understand why they were last on the leaderboard after coming first place, or assumed that the scoring was bugged. I used this opportunity to look towards established games within the space of casual, multiplayer titles and identified Mario Kart as a perfect comparison point.
The original Figma UX mock-up of the scoring changes, I opted to create a wireframe so I could highlight the pacing to the wider team.
How the scoring appears in game, note the dual crowns here depicting a tie for first place.
Working closely with a UI artist and engineer, we slowed the pacing of the scoring moment down and opted to show how, sequentially, the score achieved in each minigame affected the overall leaderboard standing. Further, we opted to place major emphasis on who was in first-place with a crown graphic as ultimately, only the player who achieves first sees any intrinsic reward.
We turned around this tighter sequencing in just two weeks, and along with a rebalance of the leaderboard scoring to create tighter gaps in overall score we saw a measurable improvement in how vocal and competitive players were during multiplayer sessions.
