Background

When I joined, the team was finalizing the first iteration of game mechanics. The game had evidence cards, action cards (to get rid of evidence), police cards and currency cards. The game felt too long, complicated and unfair. The game also required designs for each card, a set of rules and a rulebook for the game, as well as designs for a box.

Role

Co-founder, Lead Designer

As the Chief Design Officer of a startup, I worked with Artists and Project Managers to design the card game from scratch. I also worked with game designers to come up with a fair set of rules for the customer.

As the lead designer, I led the design team through a successful product launch. I took lead on:

User research
Ideation
Prototyping
User testing
Setting up a Visual Language Style Guide

Duration

October 2019 - Present (2+ years)

The Process

Product Research

Our Research Phase consisted of carrying out primary user research by giving out surveys and holding semi-structured user interviews. Along with this, we also conducted secondary market research to analyze user behavior and interest.

Market Research

For our market research, we looked at other card game companies that have released games like Exploding Kittens and Unstable Unicorns for comparative analysis.
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We also sent out surveys to understand user behavior in the current market of card games. We wanted our data points to comprise of people from all demographics, age and interests. Hence, we sent out surveys to not only people in card game communities but also young adults who could potentially be interested.

User Research

We interviewed card game collectors & enthusiasts as well as card game reviewers. We wanted to understand what aspects make them buy a card game. We chose to do a semi-structured interviews because that gave the interviewee the freedom to also talk about the things they don’t like about card games. This proved to be especially helpful because we ended up learning about what not to do.

Design Guidelines

01 Intuition

The game has to be intuitive enough for players to not have to look up rules all the time.

02 Fairness

The players should not feel that the rules of the game are, at any point, unfair.

03 Length

The game shouldn't be so long that it's boring or so short that there is no time for attachment to the game.

04 Strategy

The game should have an equal balance of strategy and luck.

Ideation

Game Mechanics

Keeping in mind our design guidelines, in this phase, we accomplished the following things-

Designed a more defined structure for the game
Remove elements that make the game complicated through user testing
Iterated through the several versions of what each card can do
Tested how each action in the game affects the overall flow of the game

It took us several months of tweaking game mechanics and play-testing to even come close to making the game what it has become. In fact, we are still in the process of improving the game.

Paper Prototypes

We made cut outs to represent cards and test out the first version of the game within our own team.

Once we had a clearer idea about the flow of the game, we gave each card a name and a proper description to test it out with our users.

Play testing

This phase took the longest for us to complete. We went through multiple versions of game and card mechanics to make sure our users can have the best experience with the game. Using insights from each play test we made changes to the game we thought were needed.

Visual Design

This was arguably the most important part of our design process. Once we had a somewhat finalized version of the game, we had to show the essence of the game through the product.
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The most exciting part was designing the cards for the game. We wanted each card to