Usability design in games is how easy it is for the player to play your game. The most common topic in this category are the controls for a game.
If the game has unresponsive controls, players will get frustrated very quickly. Common control issues include:
Platform-Specific Solutions
First-Person Shooters: If you’ve ever played a first-person shooter with a controller, it can be very difficult to aim during fast-paced combat. Features like aim assist were created to improve the user experience for aiming with a controller.
Isometric Action RPGs: Were known to be solely mouse and keyboard, but controller-based combat has improved dramatically over the years, offering a great user experience for the genre.
Another common trait for the action combat genre is the swap from gameplay controls to user interface controls. The simplified version is what we implemented with our key bind for the G Key - this snaps combat back and forth from the game to the user interface.
Many games that use systems like this have nuances that can feel clunky, so it’s important to get right.
Ground target selection for abilities is another gameplay feature that often feels unresponsive. The typical flow involves:
Sometimes the mouse is shown for this process. It can sound simple, but for some games, this can feel off and hard to use.
When designing a game, it is important to recognize development bias.
Many designs can look great on paper or in theory but once implemented into a game they can very quickly fall flat. Having bias towards your designs essentially means that you refuse to give up on an idea that may not be working.
Game design while creative can be approached as a science:
Getting feedback from friends, family, colleagues, Q&A testers, or players with a variety of backgrounds and skill levels can have significantly different results. This is why the term iteration or iterate is so often used in the industry.
Professional Players
If you make a highly competitive game, a professional esport player’s opinion will offer a different insight to gameplay versus a more casual player.
Target Audience
Depending on the vision and target audience for the game, each opinion can be very valuable reflection on what is working and what is not working.
“A game designed for everyone is a design for no one” - a common phrase in the industry.
Using critical thinking skills to examine the performance of a design really elevates it. Acting on what works or doesn’t work is extremely important to user experience design.
The learning curve in a game is something that is constantly tweaked and iterated on in games today.
Game design today can very quickly become extremely complex. Consider all the different systems you might find in a game:
The Challenge: Even if your game only utilizes a quarter of these systems, how do you teach players to learn all this?
If you try to teach everything at once, it will become overwhelming and confusing. Players will simply get lost.
Teaching them too slowly and the player might stop playing your game before it gets to the good part where everything is unlocked and the game truly becomes interesting.
Our brains can only process so much information at a time. As a general rule of thumb, showing the player a large screen of text will be hard for the player to remember.
Best Practice: It’s best to simplify each step as a player learns in the moment.
Some gameplay experiences will be intuitive and won’t need explanation:
Think about how you can display control information in a simplified manner:
This is why it’s called a learning curve - typically starting out low and curving upward until the player is aware of all systems.
The learning curve represents the gradual introduction of game systems and mechanics, allowing players to master simpler concepts before introducing more complex ones.