Shipped Title
Sanctuary World
Overview
Sanctuary World is a village building puzzle game released along side LAPC's first feature film back by Universal.
ROLE
Game Designer, Visual Designer.
Research, wireframing, data analytics, visual design, prototyping.
In Sanctuary world you follow the main characters of "The Wishmas Tree" through their campaign to build a new Sanctuary City for all of the new animals.
Problem Statement
As the movie is being released, we needed to come up with a mobile game that engages the target demographic.
Reviewing dozens of apps, analysing third party app data and correlating it with the movies target demographic we where able to identify the type of mobile app that would have the greatest appeal.
UX Design
As the primary designer I was tasked to design the user experience of the app, which started with a complete user flow map.
Once approved, and all flows accounted for, then began the low fidelity wireframing.
Going against convention, visual design elements made it into early wireframes. This was done as the visual aspect of the UI plays a much larger role in a mobile game, as it would in another app.
A game requires a richer colour palette of saturated colours which invoke excitement.
Visual elements where created in a modular fashion. All where created with 3D rendering techniques which greatly increased time to create.
As the sole creator of all visual assets for the entire game, new methods for creating industry standard artworks had to be developed.
Validation
The advantage of mobile gaming is it allows for small sample user testing on actual users in the market.
Product KPI's
Day 1 Retention : 40%
Day 7 Retention : 15%
Day 30 Retention : 5%
The advantage of mobile gaming is it allows for small sample user testing on actual users in the market.
20 minutes 6 seconds
average session length
Large scale behavioural data is only one part of the equation however. Equally important is learning more about the experience on an individual level.
To do this we identified Super Users who made up most of the user play time. This helped identify which features users where engaging with most, and leading to long term retention.
Finally internal user testing was conducted company wide resulting in over 200 initial users. This in person testing helped reveal issues not picked up through behavioural data.
Learnings
The project was a huge undertaking for a solo designer, and was delivered in only 3 months. While successful, there are still some keys things that would be done differently.
Use functional prototypes:
In this context, aspects of the game could not be forseen with just wireframes & flows, and where difficult to address post launch. This is what lead me to learn C# object oriented programming.
Pick your battles as the underdog:
We launched a game in the most lucrative mobile game genre. What we didn't realise early on is that our small team of 8 where competing with multi-billion dollar companies. While we delivered quality content with exceptional efficiency, it's an up hill battle against those with hundreds of artists and developers.
Build inter-department relationships early:
Development and Marketing had to work in accordance with the design process. The goals of these departments doesn't usually include design integrity. Cooperation would have been easier if the product goals where communicated more explicitly with these departments, so we'd all be working to the same, design centred goals.
