"Top Mafia" was an ambitious mobile game that blended elements of role-playing, match-three puzzles, and base-building. It promised to be a unique gaming experience in a saturated market. I want to take you on a journey through the ups and downs of my experience as a UI/UX designer on a game called "Top Mafia" from its humble beginnings to its eventual closure. It was a rollercoaster ride of creativity, collaboration, and lessons learned. Working on "Top Mafia" was a big team effort, and I collaborated closely with game designers, UI designers, artists, writer, and programmers. We all played a significant role in shaping the game's direction. Game designers and I brainstormed game flows and created wireframes to ensure that the gameplay was engaging and intuitive. After getting the wireframe approved, I will worked closely with my UI Lead to create stunning visual assets that would enhance the game's aesthetic. We wanted the player's experience to be not only functional but also visually appealing. Sometimes I with sync up with artists and writer to make sure our art style matched with the lore. After the UI art was crafted, I would then implement the UI into Unity, ensuring the UI has enough visual feedbacks for different edge cases, sync up with the vfx artist and animator if needed, before handover to respective programmers! This progress can be quite technical but fortunately, we have a member in a UI team who is specialize in this field, so I could get advise from her anytime! Just when things were starting to gain momentum, "Top Mafia" faced a sudden change in management. This change brought in a collaboration with a development team in China, which led to several alterations in the game's art style and features. While this presented a challenge, it also allowed us to see different perspectives and incorporate new ideas into the game. I got a new opportunity to work with UI/UX designers from China to improve and even revamp some UIs during this period of time, We were able to identify our strength and spilt work according. For example, my strength was UX and therefore my main tasks were mainly work closely with the game designers on the game flow and dev team for validation. One of the significant challenges we faced was adapting to the changes in art style, communication and game features. The transition was not always smooth, but it taught us the importance of flexibility in the gaming industry. We learned to embrace change and see it as an opportunity for growth. I see this as a new opportunity to transit from Photoshop to Figma. Figma is intuitive, easy to learn and making the production a lot faster and efficient. The second opportunity was to brush up my Chinese language; I took effort to learn when typing and speaking with my China colleagues with my cheat sheet! After months of hard work and anticipation, "Top Mafia" had its soft launch. This phase allowed us to gather feedback from players and make improvements based on their insights. However, despite our best efforts, the game faced several issues, including monetization difficulties and a competitive market. After much deliberation, the decision was made to close "Top Mafia" for various reasons.
As the journey of "Top Mafia" comes to an end, I'd like to share some valuable lessons that I, and the entire team, took away from this experience:
In the end, "Top Mafia" may not have reached the pinnacle of success we envisioned, but the journey was filled with valuable experiences and lessons that will undoubtedly shape our future endeavors in game development. It's a testament to the unpredictable nature of the industry and the resilience of those who create games.
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