Platform – Mobile & PC
Team size – 12-20
Time – 2.5 years
Engine – Unity
Wildsong was a cozy openworld adventure game in softlaunch with live service, where the player is on a quest to help and befriend animals.
Why it was cancelled
Due to the inflation of 2022-23, Wildsong, like other F2P games, started to struggle and had to find and sign with a publisher, which we did eventually.
Sadly, said publisher would eventually pull out abruptly, naming no reason.
Player sentiment
Upon cancellation, the game had 4.69 as an avg app store rating, and held generally strong player retention. The game was loved for its wholesome aesthetic, engaging quests, and approachable gameplay loop.
My Contributions
I had a broad support role during this project, starting as a programmer and then gravitating towards design.
The programming role was that of a generalist, working all over the tech-stack.
As a designer, I’ve primarily been the technical extension of the design teams, finding scope-efficient solutions by leveraging my knowledge of the tech stack. Due to the small size of the team, I’ve been working collaboratively on more or less every aspect of the game, but especially UX, gameplay, and engagement.
(Recommendations are available on request)
Homestead
I was the technical and creative owner of the Homestead, which is the cozy home of the players and all their animal friends.
Players may customize their home and interact with their closest animal friends that are roaming around, or visiting players.
Design Intention
- Player expression from craftable cosmetics
- A retention driver
- A convenient way to interact with all animal friends
- Increases a progression vector, animal friendship
- another retention driver
- A place to roleplay with other players.
- Extendable hub-level
Risks
- Loosely connected to rest of the game
- Unreliable retentiondriver
- Big scope for MVP
Design Process
I researched games with similar features such as The Sims, Animal Crossing, and Disney Magic Kingdom, and weighed their scope and transferability to our game. For our target audience, I prioritized simple, low-friction features over flexibility.
As updates went live, we would observe player behaviour in recordings, stats, and playtests, which I would use to find pain points and room for improvement. I would also consult my team, so as to ensure alignment on priorities.
Tie-ins to other systems
Decorations
Decorations are a form of reward for exploring, finding materials and recipes.
Animal Friendship
Tea party table (Unfinished prototype)
As Homestead matured, our data showed player engagement with homestead and animal friendship didn’t increase despite increase of homestead cosmetics.
I prototyped and designed the original tea-party table, which would allow players to put food on specific tables, to be enjoyed with animal or human friends. eating with animal friends would increase animal friendship.
Design Intention
- Add Homestead player activities
- Improve engagement
- Add monetization drivers
- The table and the cakes
Cross-platform support
Part 1: signifiers
One of my biggest challenges was retroactively changing the games interaction design for cross-platform, which i did together with a dedicated senior UX consultant. I was the technical owner and assisted in the design process.
Our goal was to add an agnostic system for selecting targets as well as affording interaction, as we could no longer expect the player to tap targets.
The Process
This task had many factors that would compound to a bigger challenge.
I will try to describe these factors and our responses to them
Problem: Coupling many disconnected features in code is complex
Solution: List all interactables and edge cases
I would make an excel sheet with all interactable types and estimate the scope and risk, based on their signifier types, signifier determinants, and whether they’d require a tool to setup.
Problem: Fundamental and playerfacing overhaul with many unknowns
Solution: Focus the biggest unknowns, prototype modularly to reduce risk.
During the research phase, we’d figure out the biggest unknowns and focus on those during prototyping. While implementing I would use a modular approach to enable quick pivots when needed.
Problem: Scope is too big for this timeframe
Solution: Compromise
Having worked and learned from the game’s UX both as a designer and implementor, I’d bring up the scope-efficiency of every solution during discussions.
Part 2: Input & Big screen Support
I delegated implementation of Input support to a programmer, as this would have less unknowns and playerfacing problemsolving, and more technical implementations.
My role instead was to improve alignment between the implementor and UX designers due to my knowledge of the game, it’s UX and tech as well as PC / console game design.
I did this by writing relevant documentation and preparing questions for the UX team pointing out important details pre-production. The game had a big amount and variety of interactive UI elements, which would require generic implementations which is risky.
Visual scripting
I worked with and on our visual scripting tools, adding and iterating on nodes when needed.
I would also implement flows myself, such as tutorials and certain systems. This enabled faster iterations, collaborations with our designers, and insight into the tools capabilities.
This enabled me to find areas of improvements for the designers’ user experience and increase their velocity.
Some scope-efficient tool examples
The following tools are my favourites, due to their technical simplicity and high value.
I designed and implemented both of them during downtime.
TimeScale-toggle (hold V button)
Teleport (hold ctrl and click)
Teleports the player (and mount) when holding CTRL and clicking. This also works on the map, and holding CTRL removes all map-fog.
Seasonal Community Quest
I designed and implemented a seasonal community quest that was shared among players during seasonal events. Players would progress the quest by finding a seasonal ingredient in the world, and would receive rewards.
It calculated what players “should” have collected based on activity, instead of what they actually collected, as this was a much more scope-efficient solution intended to simulate community effort while rewarding playing.
UI Implementations
I was one of the go-to UI implementors in the project, implementing a variety of UI elements and features.
This is one of the more complex UI views I made was for our DLC quests, one of our primary monetization drivers. Fidelity was key and keeping consistent scaling and whitespace between aspect ratios was suprisingly hard.
What made it hard?
This window was already using width-based UI scaling, which makes horizontal layouts hard, especially with the amount of modular elements.
The Solutions
Unitys layout group didn’t scale properly between aspect ratios. So for maintaining whitespace In the layout group, the layout group could only contain the height, and we then used an aspect ratio fitter to maintain width.
This meant that unitys built in pixel offset didn’t scale. On a per card basis, every element had to be positioned using anchor points instead of pixel-based offsets.
Because of this, text didn’t actually scale, either. Unity’s auto-size scales text based on amount of characters, and other Instead, we had to make our own text-scaling system based on the text-elements height.
Some UI animations (designed and implemented)
These are UI animations I added to the game, to enrich the UI while keeping it simple.
Pickup Animation
I made this pickup animation in the upper left corner. Its intended to be a prominent and gratifying feedback from pickups. This was a response to players during playtests missing what they picked up.
Player Customization Intro
This animation is shown very early in the game was made to afford dragability of the columns in a playful manner.
Bouncing Dialogue window
I made this to make the dialogue more playful, as they are the most shown windows in the game according to statistics.