Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Team
Co-Development with Niantic, Game Design/Engineering/Product
Launch Date
Knight Bus - April 22, 2020
S.O.S. Training - June, 2020
A Response to COVID-19
At the onset of the global crisis, players shifted in their game habits that disrupted the intended experience of the game. We saw declines in cooperative engagement and event completion rates, driven by players ultimately sheltering at home and limiting in-person meet ups.
Problem
Compared to pre-pandemic behavior, distance walking remained depressed, making map-based play increasingly difficult to participate in, threatening long-term engagement. These restrictions further exacerbate healthy resource sinks, social daily engagement, and event completion rates.
Opportunity
Recognizing the changing landscape, our team responded by expanding access to key game modes for our players. For Fortresses, where players come together to defeat enemies, it was imperative to add a layer of access beyond the map-based experience. We created a special server that any player, trying to engage with fortresses, had a way to battle together. This also unblocked players from completing Brilliant events and S.O.S. progression.
Challenge
Making a strong case for a non-map based access point challenged what the game's core gameplay loop was built around; encouraging social play and walking to points of interests. Aligning on this change would require all leadership and development groups to agree and move forward.
Impact
What we saw:
75% of DAU played Wizarding Challenges (all-record breaking)
10.4 Wizarding Challenges played per DAU on average (all-record breaking)
18% of players completed chamber level 20
90% of Wizarding Challenge chambers joined by the Knight Bus daily
Problem
The existing cooperative design lacked clear incentive and participation amongst a population that were sheltering in place. The onset of COVID-19, only fueled the problem even further which created a trickling effect on completing events and sinking resources that players would receive from these events. As we tried to increase cooperative engagement through addd daily mission and event tasks, it created a bottleneck for our players.
Events Left Incomplete
Our weeklong, tiered Brilliant Events, had a 31% completion rate amongst players who played a challenge (taken from the 4/7-4/14 part 1 of the event). This was continuing to track downward, with Wizarding Challenge tasks being the most difficult to complete. Players would ultimately receive tasks such as "Complete Wizarding Challenge Levels" and collecting specific shards only dropped through fortress battles.
Geographic & Physical Barriers
Fortresses that housed our cooperative raids were limited to each region on the map, So, for players in rural locations, this made it difficult to access especially during community events. The game required players to meet at exact physical fortress locations, limiting play for millions who did not have access to active local communities.
Challenges Were Played More in Solo Mode
The cooperative design of fortress challenges was undermined by real-world constraints. Most players defaulted to solo play because coordination proved difficult and for those that did meet up, players were forced to wait out the 2 minute countdown timer for every fortress battle. Another note, Higher tier chambers required at least 2 players to battle against elite enemies, punishing solo play.
Energy & Potion Consumption
As players were picking up potion ingredients on the map, there was inventory bottleneck issues. Conversion from ingredients to potion crafting was low, in particular, the potions used in challenge battles. Some of those potions below:
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Wit-Sharpening Potions provided an extra +50% damage bonus against elite enemies in fortress challenges.
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Extimulo Potion strongly boosted the spell casting for repeated casts against bosses. These took 4 hours to craft.
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Invigoration Draught granted extra focus before a challenge even started, which was an advantageous strategy for teams.
There was a disproportionate level of energy sinks between Wizarding Challenge and Encounters. Both require energy, which can be acquired by map-based areas (Inns), gifting, and rewards. For every 80% energy sink in encounters per DAU, 20% were used in wizarding challenges. We would hope to see that more energy sinks were invested into wizarding challenge.
Solution
Our solution was to first fix engagement through a persistent entrypoint, allowing players to coordinate with others without meeting at a map-based point. This design would include needing a fictionalized location and type of travel within the Harry Potter lore.
Additionally, we would improve the in-the-moment strategy experience. Within the Wizarding Challenge lobby, a waiting room for others to join, we added ways to opt into a challenge when ready.
Improve energy and potion consumption within Wizarding Challenges.
Introduce a player controlled start option to eliminate the forced 2 minuted countdown timer.
Give millions of isolated players access to fully stocked challenges.
Give access to millions of isolated players into fully stocked challenges.
Designs
The Knight Bus
The Knight Bus was a fictionalized form of transportation only visible to the wizarding community. It picked up magical riders and took them to their destination at fast speeds. This was a perfect narrative wrapper around the new wizarding challenge access point design.
Entrypoint Design
We evaluated two access models. One surfaced the Knight Bus as an explicit button placed above the map's UI overlay, while the other design was an 'always in view' destination on the map. We tried this version of accessing remote fortresses to keep players in the game world. Since map-based fortresses take the form of wizarding tower landmarks, we based the remote marker on familiarity. We looked at making modifications to the visual effects to distinguish between two access points. Ultimately, embedding a remote fortress into the world map introduced edge cases around placement, overlap with existing points of interest, and remaining consistently accessible. The HUD button created a clear persistent access point.
↳Knight Bus Transition
We introduced the new button as the Knight Bus feature. Placement was in a well surfaced location, with ample space and sized prominently. After opting into the remote fortress, we wanted to present players with an introductory dialog, transitioning players into the feature. From a technical side, it also initiated the connection to the unique server and ensure proper matchmaking.
↳Continuing Theme
To stay true to the narrative established for the knight bus, we used Hogwart's Castle as the final destination, where a hidden fortress was located. We created art surrounding the Hogwarts Castle and continued to theme it throughout the remote fortress UI's.
Optimizing the Lobby Experience
The lobby represents the final step in the wizarding challenge flow, where players prepare, wait for other teammates to join, and confirm when everyone is ready to start the battle. The current state of the lobby was a 2-minute timer that forced players to wait until it counted down to zero. Our first initial design was to reduce the countdown timer. During a 1-day rapid usability test focused on Wizarding Challenges, at least 30% of players complained about the timer being too short.
Key Design Changes
Under a shortened user test framework, we added small fixes to see how a small sample size audience would react to the adjustments. Some of those adjustments included:
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Reduction of timer from 2 minutes to 30 seconds.
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Adding player color assignments. Players were now assigned a specific colors in join order, starting with all players that join an empty lobby first, red. The goal here is to allow teams to better coordinate roles before entering battles.
Insights
Insight
Given the scale of changes being made to access fortresses remotely, engagement improvements needed to be tested with a small sample of our audience. If remote access was successful and adopted by our players, our first major focus was testing the lobby experience. We conducted several tests, both internal stakeholders and usability 1-day surveys for a small group of participants. Some of the main concerns were around the lobby countdown experience as well as possible drop rewards.
Key Discovery
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Players wanted control over the timer. Running down the reduced countdown timer was still problematic for both strategic and solo engagers. For teams, the reduced timer was too short of time to coordinate with others, while solo players wanted to get into battle faster.
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View possible event reward drops. Runestones, a fortress challenge entry resource, are deeply tied to desired reward drops. There isn't a clear way to see if the team's runestones will have a higher percentage drop of event specific shards to help complete the event.
Ready Button Design
Adding a player-controlled start button gave flexibility for players to strategize and begin the challenge when everyone in the party was ready. The button was a combined visualization and interactive element that allowed players to:
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Start a challenge. The first person that lands in the challenge lobby is the leader of either a cooperative or solo fight. This player can "Start" a challenge before the countdown ends.
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Player ready state. A non-verbal way to communicate to players in the party that they're ready to begin the challenge.
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Not ready? Players can tap again on the button to communicate they need more time to adjust their runestone selection or switch professions.
Adaptive Countdown Timer
We had set some rules around the countdown timer to adapt to player and team needs. Since giving players more control, regulating the timer based on player states was explored.
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2-Minute Countdown. Rather than shortening the timer, we reverted back to the 2-minute time window, preparing for a higher density of player engagement through the Knight Bus. Players will now be able to bypass the countdown timer, therefore the length of time shouldn't hurt the player experience.
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15 Second Jump. Once a player readies up with more than 2 in their party, the countdown shifts down to a 15 second timer. At this point
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Not ready? Players can tap again on the button to communicate they need more time to adjust their runestone selection or switch professions.
Countdown Behavior
As I explored different indicators and button interactions, establishing a clear way to communicate readiness to others in the party was important. It is up to the leader, the player who joined the lobby first, to receive signal from all participants, that everyone is ready to start battling. To support last-minute strategy changes, we wanted players to get into the habit of un-readying their status. The ready button now becomes a toggle, immediately communicating their status change to others, especially the leader.
Final Design
We revamped the lobby design to support higher volumes of multiplayer engagement enabled by the Knight Bus. To push for specific actions taken by other players, I added an additional loading indicator. An animated status indicator provided live feedback when a party member joined in or was editing their selections. We also updated the timer format from full seconds to a minutes:seconds display to scan the time remaining more effectively.
Rewards Preview
To help players find the last remaining aspects of the event to complete, we introduced a preview of rewards directly on the lobby screen. This would show instant updated confirmation of what specific rewards would drop, guaranteed and probable, from the team's combined runestone selections. The family type and runestone level, increase the quantity and quality of the rewards. As chamber level and runestone value increase, the drop rate increases. Because each player's runestone selection also heavily influenced the challenge reward drops, we wanted the lobby redesign to make runestone selection easy to update. A player can view more reward information through a look in window triggered by the possible rewards container. This pop up can also be accessed before selecting a chamber in the beginning of the challenge flow.
Results & Metrics
Impact
Phase 2
Post 1-month launch showed that the Knight Bus became the primary method of wizarding challenge participation. We saw a sustained level of engagement during our weekly events, with our already daily active event players completing registry pages (pre-pandemic, players couldn't earn challenge encounter fragments due to lack of fortress entry). With increased wizarding challenge engagement, participation drove large portion of daily energy sinks. This caused for severe imbalance between how fast players were running through energy vs. how it was collected. Players were bottlenecked inadvertently because the game couldn't keep up with the demand of how we were outputting energy resources.
The Answer to Energy Demand
High tiered chambers spawn more elite foes, requiring more spell energy consumption. Because spell energy was capped at 100, longer fortress challenges created a resource management problem. How we wanted to solve for this issue was in two parts.
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While S.O.S. Training was an in-development feature, we saw an opportunity to extend the design to offer spell energy bonuses. These bonuses would scale over time, and can be unlocked only through the professions tree.
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Offer an in-app purchase for spell energy during wizarding challenge. While this would require switching focus on battling, we felt it outweighed the experience of not contributing when spell energy had depleted.
In-App Purchase
We added a just in time pop up, once a player had hit below the 10 energy spell threshold. Enemies in mid-chambers typically required about 5-10 spell casts each, about 30 spell cast for a total challenge. Most active players engaging with wizarding challenges on a daily basis, were within the mid-tier level chambers. At an average of 5 challenges per session, they would cap out of energy spells. We offered an additional 50 spell casts for 100 gold to keep the transaction manageable while giving enough to land the last minute hit before the timer runs out.
Bonus Energy Buffs
A new feature called S.O.S Training introduced players to professions. When a player selects their profession, they unlock unique spells throughout the skill tree. The design unlocked bonus charms that would increase spawn rates in encounter traces and potion ingredients. In addition, we designed one for spell energy, that spawned bonus energy directly onto the map for nearby players to pick up.
