FLO
Details
Role: UX Researcher
Context: Client work for indie game company, Plot Armor Studios. January 2023, two week sprint to collect data and present to stakeholders/game dev team.
Methods: Emotion mapping, player profile/personas, survey, research synthesis & presentation
Tools: Google Forms, FigJam
How might we use research to help FLO reach its full commercial potential as a game?
FLO (or, Fantasy of the Last Originals) is a single player fantasy RPG fighting game with a stance-based combat system, currently in development by Plot Armor Studios.
The Project Lead had a game design document ready and was already demoing the game prototype to potential investors—but one question bothered him: “How do I know I’m designing the right game for my target audience?”
That’s where I came in, to perform early discovery research so we could know—not guess—exactly what the target audience loves and hates in games similar to FLO, thus improving its success of investor buy-in and commercial performance.
The growing seed of a game
Over a group Discord call, the Project Lead presented a demo of the game combat and early user interface concepts.
A lot of questions surfaced across our team. We weren’t just wondering how the game mechanics worked - we were all fundamentally wondering:
What would the "fun factor" be for this game?
And how could we know THIS game idea, specifically, would be the most engaging and commercially successful idea?
I said: Turn to the players!
First, we needed to determine who our target audience is. What games do they play?
Next, we could find out what they like and dislike about those games.
Finally, I’d synthesize the research results and develop Player Profiles (aka personas) to provide a north star for FLO’s development.
Who are we battling against?
I sat down with the Project Lead and a few team members to ask questions about what kind of game FLO would ideally be and who they thought its direct competitors were.
After some facilitated discussion, we landed on three games:
Genshin Impact
Elden Ring
Super Smash Bros Ultimate
We also determined two specific areas to get user opinions on:
Story
Combat
Using our competitor’s games as a benchmark, I could now reach out to players of those games and develop in-depth questions.
Since the type of information we wanted to find out was exploratory, I decided to run a qualitative survey to get a temperature reading from the target audience.
Polling the Players
I lead the writing of the survey questions, with the project manager reviewing and requesting adjustments. I was mindful of avoiding conditioning the survey participants by avoiding leading questions.
I used the power of social media to source the right set of participants. I posted a call to participate on the company profile (whose following comprises of various gaming fans and industry workers), and asked specific Linkedin members with some social cred to reshare the post.
We received 26 responses in just a few days. I made sure we had a good sample size of responses to each of our 3 competitor games.
One has to strike a balance between too little and too much data (just enough research to have a direction vs. an overwhelming amount of sorting and coding work for one researcher), so I closed the survey at that point.
Hunting for emotions
I combed through the data manually and created note cards in FigJam, organizing them by the game and question asked.
I color-coded the ones that had an emotional charge in yellow, as I began to notice a range of emotional intensities attributed by players to certain game aspects.
I grouped the emotionally charged responses in an Emotion Map, not by the game they were responding to, but by the two categories of gameplay we were interested in examining (combat and story)—this would help build a bigger picture of our blended audience.
Not one, but TWO player profiles emerged from my data.
There was the casual, story-focused player (The Adventurer) and the hardcore combat-focused player (The Warrior.)
The Plot Armor team could now use these profiles to guide their game design decision making, benefiting from the work of their competitor games to identify goals to aim for and pitfalls to avoid.
An actionable report, next steps?
I synthesized all of my findings, insights, and recommendations into a FigJam board which I shared with the team. Admittedly, the amount of insights and potential action items is very broad.
While I did my best to organize the board by our key areas of interest (Combat and Story), being on the receiving end of this much info at once could feel overwhelming. (Although the Project Lead did receive it well:)
To mitigate any potential overwhelm, if I had continued in my role as UXR at the time, I would’ve sat down with the Project Lead (and the rest of the team) to review, chunk out, and prioritize the work to be done, creating a new artifact to visualize the decisions resulting from this discussion.
With that said, here are a few close-up looks where you can see how I chose to organize and present information:
Takeaways
By performing this research early on in the development process, the developer can potentially avoid a lot of time consuming and expensive re-work further down the line.
The Plot Armor Studios team now has a set of UX artifacts (like the player profiles) and a competitive edge (knowing common wins and pitfalls), that they can benchmark their progress against as development continues.
If I was to continue working on this project (and I just might—FLO’s development is ongoing!), I would:
Run batches of user testing on the game’s mechanics to iterate and polish them. Does fighting enemies and bosses feel like a satisfying challenge, or does something about the game controls, UI, or other aspect cause friction?
Test the UI and iconography of the game. Do players understand the iconography used for switching fighting stances and activating moves? What about other iconography? Is there a match between what we’re intended to communicate and what the player perceives?
P.S. Here’s some feedback from the Project Lead a year later:
“I've done a ton of additional market/product research since you provided me this work, and to my delight a lot of your analysis is still relevant. I use your analysis to double-check my work and it brings me confidence while working out the major points in our evolving combat system.”
— Khenan Newton, Gameplay Engineer and Project Lead