As part of our education, we were tasked with developing a game concept of our choice. Our creation became “Echoes of the Runeweaver”. An open-world, adventure RPG set in a dark fantasy world inspired by Nordic/Scandinavian folklore. Because this is a game with fighting, violence, blood and moral decisions, we are targeting Mature 17+ gamers who crave challenging and rewarding gameplay.
Through various methods such as competitive analysis, wireframes, low-fidelity prototypes, interaction design, visual design, and usability testing, our task and goal were to complete a game development process from a UX perspective within two weeks. This includes creating an engaging player experience, balancing complexity and simplicity, and integrating feedback into the design process.
The core concept of the game centers on a young protagonist from a peaceful village who is thrust into a dark and dangerous world after monsters destroy their home. The main character embarks on a journey of vengeance and survival, learning to fight and harnessing the power of ancient runic tattoos, which come with both strength and a heavy burden. Along the way, they uncover the truth about the Witch responsible for the chaos and ultimately confront and defeat her to restore peace. This journey transforms the protagonist, giving them a deeper understanding of the world and a renewed sense of purpose.
Our group consisted of five people, and our working method closely resembled Scrum with a focus on design sprints. Since Scrum has an agile structure, it was an excellent fit for the project, which required short design sprints with many iterations and a more horizontal structure. Apart from having a decision-maker and a facilitator, we approached the project in a way that allowed us to share responsibilities, with everyone involved in all aspects of the work.
UX design process – Discovery
Our team has used the Double Diamond method, and during the exploration and research phase, tests and selections were made within our team. A series of groupings of genres, interests, and inspiring existing games, movies, music, and books were conducted to establish a common path forward and to ensure a diversity of ideas. In the first round, we found that horror and Nordic mythology interested us.
Design
Through a large number of creative Crazy 8’s and wireframes with multiple iterations, we developed an early story and timeline for our game idea. These prototypes were created analogously and then brought into our Figjam, which is also where we did our basic documentation to get a good overview of our process.
During this process, we also developed our intended upgrade system, the Rune Tattoo System. Our idea is that the game character will collect various tattoos throughout the game via missions, which grant different abilities. However, there are limitations on the number of tattoos one can have at the same time, which is also part of the game concept where the player must make functional choices to complete certain missions.
We sketched a simple model of our intended interface and navigation system in Figma, which was partially interactive, allowing us to test different functions on various users. During this process, we drew inspiration from several existing games and their UI
Then it was time for the team’s first game programming in Unreal. Here, we created a simple level with three different challenges to test various participants. During these tests, we were able to adjust the difficulty level and improve various UX aspects. We also noticed that the test participants quickly became motivated to complete the level, which was not entirely easy. The level of challenge sparked an emerging ‘addiction’ in the participants
Challenges
Partytuta faced a tough challenge: to create a dark, exciting, Norse mythology-inspired open-world game that reflected their vision and met gamers expectations. This was especially evident as Partytuta is still in development, and many steps in this game design course were entirely new to them.
Solution
The solution for Partytuta was collaboration and a thirst for knowledge. By making product and design decisions backed by new insights, Partytuta focuses their development efforts on the areas that matter most to their players while not losing the core of their idea. And of course iteration, iteration, iteration…
As previously mentioned, we observed a clear ‘gaming devil’ in our test participants. Almost immediately, they were triggered to try speedrunning the level, which was both successful and fun for us. We also had to make some changes to our Unreal design when we noticed during the tests that certain elements could be missed or were too difficult.
