Postmortem: Some Reflections on User Experience

I'm not here to showing off, so I’m not going to mention my game's name. I want to discuss some of the things I learned from the user experience after completing the game.

Simply, I made a mobile deduction game with many levels. Each level have many different characters.(yeah I know you're busy, so mobile deduction game is everything you need to know)

I didn’t have very high expectations at first, so the game only had a little over 20 levels and around a dozen characters. However, players really liked the gameplay, and a surprisingly large number of people played it even without any advertising or promotion. So I had to quickly add a lot of new levels and characters. Now, the game has around 200 levels and 70 characters.(and over 700,000 mobile downloads, haha)

There are both advantages and disadvantages to adding content after the game release. The obvious advantage is that I can add and modify content based on player feedback. Through this process, I’ve learned a lot about user experience.

1,Testing with friends doesn’t work, they rarely point out the problems.

A lot of articles have already covered these points, so I won’t go into them again. And yes, my friends in the game industry behaved exactly as expected: they were polite, encouraging, and mostly played the game out of courtesy. they just said things like, “Uh, the music are good. Gameplay? I don’t know. I was busy, have to do something else. Bye.”

2. New players tend to understand the rules first before playing. When they encounter something they don't understand, they stop immediately instead of play the game to find out.

In level 4, I introduced a character who is immune to damage. Enemies in the game can also disguise themselves as this character, but disguised enemies are not actually immune to damage.

My original intention was to use this character to teach players how to tell the difference between a disguised enemy and the real character, and how to identify which is which: simply playing the game, damages the character: if it’s the real character, nothing happens, but if it’s a disguised character, it dies and game wining. Then learned that disguised character havn't real ability.

No! That’s not how the players interpreted it. they immediately stopped playing and left comments reporting that Level 4 was impossible to complete, because they assumed the enemies were immune to all damage, meaning they couldn’t kill them and complete the level.

My plan failed. My intention was for players to play the game, discover the mechanics (disguised character are not real), and figure out what strategies to use. But hell no, quite a lot of players first try to reason things out and plan a strategy based on their assumptions. If they think it won’t work, they simply don’t try playing the game to see what actually happens.

There were a few other levels where the same thing happened. A character would impose a one-time penalty, but some players interpreted it as a persistent penalty. They then commented that this persistent penalty made the level too difficult and that the character was unbalanced.

(In reality, everyone can tell immediately that it’s only a one-time penalty if they simply play the level. The level is actually quite easy.)

How many times has this happened? Uh, it’s hard to count—probably around 100 times. All I can do is tell them over and over again: “Just play the game, and you’ll see.” Not many people reply to me is it worked, but I imagine they’re thinking: “Hell no. What if I play and lose? I’m not playing until I see!”

Imagine a level in Plants vs. Zombies where Crazy Dave tells you to dig up three Peashooters, after which you start a Bowling level where you use bowling balls to defeat the zombies. But if the player quits the game at this point and says, “There’s something wrong with this level. Only Peashooters can attack the zombies, and I dug up my all three Peashooters, so now I have no plants that can attack the zombies. This level is impossible to beat. It must be a bug.”

WTF！This sounds crazy, but it really happened. A lot of players think this way and give feedback like this.

I’ve read some articles advocating for letting players learn the rules naturally as they play, but I don’t think those kinds of articles work anymore. Players have changed. These days, mandatory tutorials and explicit explanations may actually be better suited to them.

• Don’t introduce unrelated mechanics in advance!

This is an extension of Reflection 2. Yes, players will get confused and start wondering how this mechanic relates to the current level. They may assume there’s some hidden interaction they haven’t been told about, and then stop playing to spend half an hour thinking it over.

I designed a character whose ability was partly relevant to the current level, while the other part had nothing to do with it and only became relevant in the next level. Quite a few players stopped, took screenshots, and sent me feedback asking what the half of the ability meant and how it affected passing the level.

I didn’t tell them, “Just keep playing, it’ll be explained in the next level.” I knew that wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t keep playing long enough to reach the next level.

My ideal design was that players would encounter an unfamiliar mechanic here, become curious about it, and then have that curiosity answered in the next level, giving them a sense of satisfaction. But no—there was no satisfaction. Players just stopped, assumed they were stuck, and got increasingly frustrated, never reached the next level.

3. Yes, there are many issues with comprehension, and ambiguity is unavoidable.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."--Cardinal Richelieu

This is a deduction game, so the rules need to be extremely rigorous. Even though I’m fully aware of this and try very hard to avoid ambiguity, all kinds of bizarre interpretations still keep coming up.

It honestly feels like a fever dream. No matter how reasonable I think an explanation is, players always manage to find some wildly unexpected way to interpret it.

There’s a character in the game who is immune to damage if a condition is met. Pretty straightforward, right? And yet I’ve gotten dozens of questions from players asking, “If the condition isn’t met, why are they still alive? why isn’t this character take damage? ”

I was genuinely baffled. I never said anywhere in the rules that they would die. Why would anyone assume that?

Then I realized, “Oh, they’re reasoning backward.” It’s something they picked up from other deduction games: the idea that you’re supposed to infer the rules in reverse. I could only awkwardly explain that the rules don’t work that way: being immune to damage when a condition is met does not mean the character will be damaged when that condition isn’t met.

And, the other example, I designed a mechanics depends on numerical values, and I specifically wrote “less than.” Then someone asked me whether 2 is “less than 2”. Yes, this happened four separate times with four separate people. I even saved screenshots just to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating from schizophrenia.

However, I noticed something else: misunderstandings tend to happen in the beginner levels , but in a later level, I wrote a description that was genuinely highly ambiguous, and the players simply ignored the ambiguity and kept playing normally. I was the one who eventually realized that the wording was ambiguous. and edited it two weeks later(nobody noticed it).

3, Other tutorials are right: players has severe amnesia. Don’t design a mechanism which can’t be written in a single sentence.

I roughly followed the guidance, but a few characters still ended up with this issue, and they immediately became major memory hogs. This is different from the comprehension mentioned above, the player simply... can’t remember them.

One character had an ability that was roughly: do A and B. The result was that a large number of players kept asking me, “Why did B happen?” and I could only awkwardly tell them to read the character’s ability description, where it clearly says that they do B.

Then I switched the order of the sentence to “do B and A,” and the result was that a large number of players started asking me why A happened.

Another similar case was when I designed two characters with opposite abilities: one does A (but not B), while the other does B (but not A). Players ended up asking about both characters, thinking they were bugged, didn't do A and B.

When I saw the feedback, I almost lost myself. In player's screenshot, the character description clearly said: “does A (but not B),” and then the player asked me why the character didn’t do B. I went back and reread the screenshot and his question over and over again.

This improved somewhat after I emphasized the text in bold.

Another takeaway is that it’s probably best to avoid designing mechanics with synergy(e.g., If A happens, do B).

Players often have a hard time remembering whether A happened in the first place and understanding why B happened as a result.

4, Players tend to make different assumptions based on other games.

It’s common knowledge, but I happened to run into the downside of it. Every player comes from a different gaming background, and they tend to make all sorts of strange assumptions.

First, there was the question of whether a character should still have abilities after death. This caused a huge amount of disagreement. I received tons of bug reports saying, “Why are their abilities still active after they die? This is a bug!”

Then, when I changed it so that abilities stopped working after death, I got another flood of bug reports saying, “Why don’t their abilities work after they die? This is a bug!”

This disagreement forced me to look for the reason behind it, and I found it. These players had previously played many different games. In some games, abilities stop working after a character dies; in others, they remain active after death.

Players came into my game carrying those assumptions with them. When the game behaved as they expected, they simply kept playing without saying anything. But when it violated their expectations, they would passionately post feedback insisting that it was a bug.

Making a game too unique can be a bad thing too. not only need to understand the rules of my own game, but also the rules of other games. This bothers me more than the other issues mentioned above. I had to play many other games and learn how their rules work, then tell player that “No, you can’t interpret this the way you would in Game A; it works the opposite way here. And no, you can’t apply the rules from Game B either; this game doesn’t work that way.”

This is true. I even made several tutorial levels specifically to teach players how this game’s rules differ from those of other games. There’s also an achievement that pops up when a player tries to do something the way they would in another game, the achievement just telling them that it won’t work here.

At this point, I genuinely hate that I made this deduction game. It’s just so exhausting. I’d rather make a AAA FPS or an open world game, even those would probably have fewer problems with User Experience.

No one asks why, in an FPS, when an enemy attacks the player, the player dies, right? But in a deduction game, people will ask where the ice cream is, is it a no ice cream bug, because in another deduction game, when the enemy attacks the player, a unicorn shows up carrying ice cream! WTF!

These are the things I think I did right.

1，My UI is clear enough, and the controls are simple and intuitive to use. Very few players have ever complained about this.

Some players have complained about the lack of a restart button, but that's all.

I was once worried that players might not realize the UI could be scrolled vertically and players get stuck. But no, every player understood this kind of UI interaction, so nobody got stuck here.

2，My game is not very difficult, and most people can complete it (unlike many puzzle games, which are difficult as hell).

3，My game has enough guidance and explanations (if players are willing to read them), so no one has complained about a lack of guidance, only about difficulties in comprehension.

4，The stranger and rarer the questions players ask, the more it indicates that the common questions have already been resolved and that normal gameplay has no obstacles.

This is the survivor bias effect. I know about it, and I’ve accepted it. I try not to get angry at players’ strange questions.

5，The game is fun, which is why players pay attention to it and ask questions about it.

submitted by /u/Hungry_Mouse737
[link] [comments]