A small video game company that was based in the Sacramento area of California. 5PG was most known for their web-based games Dawn of the Dragons, Clash of the Dragons, Legacy of a Thousand Suns, and other titles.
Dawn of the Dragons had evolved to include many features and became overwhelming and hard to parse. This made it difficult for users to navigate and achieve their goals without frustration.
Create assets, reorganize layouts, and introduce more breathing room that will help reduce some pain points. These adjustments should help to improve the user experience within the game.
I began by familiarizing myself with the current state of the game, analyzing the architecture, assets, layouts, and more. I was tasked to focus on specific high traffic parts of the game that needed a revamp before the smaller side portions. I worked with community managers, developers, and more to learn the ins and outs of the content I would need to reorganize and how they worked within the game.
After becoming more familiar with the game features I began to brainstorm ways to improve it all. This ranged from creating more breathing room in the layouts to building other visual assets from scratch. I continued to do more research on competitors or similar genre games to inform my design decisions. Elements from various sources were considered to improve the visuals and usability within the game.
Once design ideas became more concrete based on internal feedback, it was time to prototype and test them. I worked closely with developers to transfer my designs into code. Once everything was updated, they went into an alpha stage to test internally for functionality. Following this was the beta stage where it went live for users to access and provide feedback.
Since Dawn of the Dragons was a web-based game that pushed out multiple updates each month, it was perpetually in beta stage. The images above show before and after of the revamped pages within Dawn of the Dragons that went live. They received mostly positive feedback when launched for the aesthetic changes and reducing pain points.
From this project I gained hands on UI/UX experience within multiple design sprints. Additionally, I learned more about the player base and what they felt were pain points and improvements. The game was brought into a more modernized version of itself with new visuals and increased usability. This was done in a team environment of helpful individuals including my UI/UX supervisor, Build Masters, Community Managers, Content Designers, and more.
You can see some of the visuals I designed in action on a fan-made tutorial video from YouTube below.
