The Dark Politician Rises
A mobile game based on the famous boardgame "The Wonderful Island" in Taiwan. It was a political satire action adventure game portraying Taiwanese politicians.
My Role
Lead UX Designer:
I created wireframes and prototypes. I also worked with the game designer to ensure the gamification and user experience are smooth and intuitive.
Project Manager:
I managed our outsourced artist and UI designer, making sure they deliver cohesive UIs and arts. I worked alongside developers to provide them with the project scope in addition to holding design and development meetings.
The Ideation
Instead of copying the whole gameplay from original boardgame, we decided to do something different for the ‘The Dark Politician Rises’ game. The boardgame had a pretty well-known IP with a solid fan base. We first did user research through surveys, then market research by learning that retro was the trend at the time. Thus, we came up with the idea of remaking this into a retro game while still keeping the core spirit of political satire. We also added AR and LBS features to spice up the game. Gamers would play as the new generation rookie politician and go up against the opposing party.
Since we were not only targeting the original fans, we leveraged the design decisions by making it easier to play for a public who were previously unfamiliar with the boardgame.
User Testing & The Problems
Our main challenges were resources. With a limited budget, the question of how to balance ideal levels of creativity with a practical scope for development was the biggest challenge for our team.
After User testing we found that most audiences were fascinated by the political satire and the UI. However, it seemed like the audience didn’t really understand how to play and what the purpose of the game was. We received a lot of feedback on the main control panel.
User testing on a Taipei Game Show 2019
The solutions
We refined our starting user flow by adding some storyline and implementing a tutorial, making the game easier to learn. Gamers could learn how to play after passing the tutorial checkpoint.
We changed the control panel based on the feedback from usability testing which stated that it had been hard to use.