Design & Discovery
Wireframes
As the project grew and we added more features, I created wireframes to help architect some of the features that existed outside of the main gameplay. Even though it was easy to add new UI to the game directly within Unity 4.6, I found it easier to generate wireframes for features that had not yet been implemented. This made it easier to start a discussion before any code or in-game assets were necessary.
Related Artifacts:
Competitive Analysis
I am very familiar with the Worms series of games, which our game was loosely based on. I also played games like League of Legends and Vainglory to learn more about the MOBA genre. These games were all major influences on our project so it was important to the team that everyone understand how they work.
User Testing
I iterated on the user interface and interactions in order to create the most intuitive gameplay experience possible. In our initial playtesting sessions we mostly played with other members of the team. We got very good at playing the game! Once we opened up the playtesting sessions to our colleagues a couple of problems became immediately clear. One: the game was played in real time, which was only more chaotic when more players were added. Two: we needed to standardize the controls for all moves and abilities in order to make learning new characters require less guesswork.
Rapid Prototypes
The game itself was playable very early on, so most rapid prototyping was done within the project on a daily basis. However, I did make a few animatics to quickly illustrate my thoughts and share them with the team. For example, I created an animated targeting reticule in Flash that would have taken a considerable amount of time to program in Unity.
