Wei Xie
 Game Designer


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Wei Xie

Game feel - happy loading screen

9/28/2018

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It's really really bad to lose players in the loading screen before they even enter the game. 
Technically we should optimize our system to reduce the loading time, and I know it's very expensive. 
As a designer, I wanna help by figuring out ways to make players FEEL the loading time is shorter. 

1. Animate the loading screen
eg. loading background, loading bar, or new animated element 
--> Never make players feel the screen is frozen
​--> Add something fun for players to look at
​

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In MarioKart, the loading bar is made of clip arts of game characters. The characters scroll from right to left with a cute bouncing animation which makes the waiting feel less boring. 
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In Onmyoji, there's a little character hops together with the loading bar. It's a good character aspiration and also cheap to implement. (2-5 frames animation)
2. Smooth the loading animation
--> eg. ease in and ease out. Make the loading feels less buggy

"Fake" the loading animation a little bit if necessary.
​--> Stuck at 90% feels less painful than stuck at 20%
for example, if your average loading time is 6 - 15s. You can "fake" the animation as:
it always take the app 1s to load from 0 to 50%, and 2s from 50% to 90%, then 20 s from 90% to 100%.
Whenever the actual loading progress exceeds the fake progress, take the real one.


3. Make sure the assets are cheap so they can fit into the bundle.
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Game Feel - HS tutorial TRANSITIONS

7/20/2018

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Keep as many players as possible in the game experience is very important for tutorial design. It's very important to have a seamless experience to keep players engaged. Here's a simple case study of Hearthstone's tutorial transitions:
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1. Win the game
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2. Victory popup (blur the background)
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3. Reward popup (blur the background)
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5. Scene transition  (Dim --> dark --> reveal the new scene)
4. Menu popup (blur + dim the background)
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6. New battle starts
  • Reduce the clock time and number of taps during transitions
  • Make players feel they are in the same world helps simulate a seamless experience
  • Don't signal a clear session break (offer players a reason to leave) before players finish the tutorials
  • Hook players
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How to show placement grid?

3/19/2018

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CR only shows the invalid placement grid (the red zone) instead of showing the available area. 

Some thoughts:
Many games show you where you can't place either through red or environment.
Placement grid is a battle language that most of the casual players have no context of. (It's been proved by many playtests)

While red area is a universal language means "NO".  

For CR, the background color is green, so it makes more sense to show red area.
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A Visceral ARPG – Diablo III

12/9/2017

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Diablo III is an action role-playing video game developed and published by Blizzard Entertainment. It was one of the most exciting and visceral action role-playing games in recent memory.
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As far as I understand, visceral player actions are primitive, natural, and come from players’ internal desires without much thinking. Visceral player actions usually provide in deep, cutting, and inwardly satisfying feelings for players. When I was playing Diablo III, I found many of my operative actions came from raw emotions and brought strong feeling of satisfaction. In this section, I’m going to identify and define the components that create that polished game feel. (I’ll only discuss about the PC version since I haven’t played the console version yet.)

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MOBA Game Character Design

4/12/2017

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Here are some thoughts of how to design interesting characters for MOBA game. I'm very into this kind of games, welcome to discuss with me ヽ(✿゚▽゚)ノ
Goals/principles to create interesting characters
The character fits the existing character web
Firstly, I need to identify the role of the character: Is it a warrior, an assassin/carry or a support character? Is it melee or ranged? What’s the difficulty of playing this character? Will it be a good fit for the existing character web?  

Secondly, I would like to define the traits of the character. Make sure the character has unique mechanics among other characters.

Thirdly, design the background of the player that fits in the game world.

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Community System of Clash Royale

3/16/2017

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Clash Royale is a real-time multiplayer strategy mobile game developed by Supercell. It’s a hybrid of CCG and tower defense. Players can collect cards and duel players in real time in the arena. I would like to talk about the community system that fosters meaningful connections between players.
Clan System
Clans are the guilds formed by players. In this in-game community, you can chat with your clanmates, donate and request cards, and earn trophies to contribute to the clan.

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PABO (GGJ 2015) post-mortem

2/18/2016

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​PABO is a physics-based puzzle game for casual gamer.  ​I started this project with Tenghao Wang, Zongye Yang and Shengze Zhang for Global Game Jam (GGJ) 2015. Together we created a 3­level prototype for PC in 48 hours based on the theme “What do we do now”. ​
Here is the post-mortem I wrote for this very firt version. Later, we have a lot iterations and published to the App store and the Windows store. I'll keep updating the progress.

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Suggestions of Tutorial Design of League of Legends

4/22/2015

 
Generally speaking,  teaching naive players how to play is one of the key challenges of game design. It becomes harder for multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games because of the complexity of game features and the challenge of teaching a multiplayer game via a single player experience. Since League of Legends is my favorite MOBA game and I am very familiar with it, I decided to take this game as a case study and combine it with my educational background to talk about its tutorial design and my suggestions.

Brief Introduction

League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) video game developed by Riot Games. The tutorial is a single player experience in which the player is guided to learn the basics and more complex concepts of the League of Legends gameplay.

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What I learned from playtests

4/9/2015

 
​Lessons Learned:
1. Make our guests comfortable
     - Children-friendly vocabulary
2. Ask more helpful questions
    - Give choices for questions
3. How to Collect data
     - Separated roles for notetakers
4. How to test when you have incomplete build
     - Paper prototypes!
5. Sometimes we need to change the playetest midway
     - Improvise
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Pabo’s Adventure #3

3/26/2015

 
Team Bopa (me, Chiu, Michael and Ryan) spent an insane weekend to polish the Global Game Jam prototype version of PABO. This time we made 15 levels based on 3 themes and made up a OK story for the game. Now it is called “PABO’s Adventure” and is available in Windows Store.

In the previous version, we had on instruction scene that  ideally teach SPACE to start. A lot of people get the idea of use SPACE to transform, but only some of them figure out they can transform multiple times. During our playtests, we found out that some of our players tried to succeed on the first SPACE transform to floating. Our intent is that players don't just press SPACE once but toggle back and forth as needed to solve the puzzle.

We decided to add some very gentle levels that are easy to start. We canceled the instruction scene, instead we create a new level 1 as our tutorial.

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