294: Designing UX for Games (feat. Tea Chang) (& Endgame Discussion)

This week, we welcome Tea Chang, a UX Designer working on League of Legends at Riot Games, to talk about designing user experiences for gamers. At the end of the show, Tea sticks around for a long, spoiler-filled discussion of Avengers: Endgame. In Follow-up, we read and respond to your feedback regarding the cover art concept from last week. And as always, we share a few cool things, like a video series about movies, some state-specific branding, and a little indie film about superheroes. Spoilers spoilers spoilers. Spoilers.

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• Last week, we tweeted out a first draft of the new cover art
• Video: "The Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup"
• Brett Yanoski likes the mask idea but thinks the execution needs work
• Ryan Morrison and Luca Orio gave us their seals of approval
• Alex Binder likes the graphic Ds
• Chrish Dunne would prefer a better logotype and more abstract Ds
• Follow us on Twitter and stay tuned for more versions of the cover art
• Mskellybrooks left us a very nice iTunes review
• You can leave one for us, too :)

• Check out Tea Chang on Twitter and at her personal site
• League of Legends is a wildly popular multiplayer online battle arena game from Riot Games
• Video: "Playtesting - How to Get Good Feedback on Your Game - Extra Credits"
• Literally unplayable is "an expression—often sarcastic—indicating that a video game is so badly broken that it prevents a player from progressing or enjoying the experience"
• Vivi Rosenstein's stance on assigning blame for suboptimal design has matured over the years
• Banner blindness is "a phenomenon in web usability where visitors to a website consciously or unconsciously ignore banner-like information"
• Article: "Get ready to see more ads on Google’s traffic app Waze"
• Adobe XD is "the fastest way to design, prototype, and share any user experience"
• Video: "The Magic of Making Sound" is a great peek into foley, an art which, when done well, goes unnoticed
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild forces you to use a wide range of weapons by making them both easy to find and quick to break
• Video game design is "the process of designing the content and rules of a video game in the pre-production stage"
• Article: "'Mortal Kombat 11' Requires More Than $6,000 to 100%, According to Early Estimates"
• We talked about the interface and game design of Apex Legends on episode 283: Deadly American Idol
• In the gorgeous game Gris, "light puzzles, platforming sequences, and optional skill-based challenges reveal themselves as more of Gris’s world becomes accessible"
• Video: "Portal 2 Intro", in which a tutorial is hidden behind a funny, story-driven calibration test

• Brian shared Patrick H. Willems, a YouTuber who makes videos about movies
• Check out the Patrick Explains series, especially the one about The Fast and the Furious
• Gabriel Valdivia introduced Brian to the channel
• Tea shared the team page for Mayor Pete Buttigieg, which has some really nice branding for each US state
• Shepard Fairey is famous for his Obama Hope poster (and the Obey clothing brand)
• Marshall shared Avengers: Endgame and discussed it with Tea and Brian in a segment called...

!!! SPOILERS !!!

• Video: "Every Avengers: Endgame Easter Egg", in which 209 easter eggs are enumerated
• Video: "Rocky Training" is the prototypical montage sequence showing a protagonist's improvement over time
• The Dark Night of the Soul is "a moment, usually at the end of the second act of a three-act story, where all seems lost and the protagonist must confront 'a collapse of perceived meaning'"
• r/inthesoulstone

!!! SPOILERS !!!

• We are @designdetailsfm
  • Brian is @brian_lovin and [email protected]
  • Marshall is @marshallbock
  • @Sarahberus and @Luperdev make us sound smarter than we are
• Join the conversation on Spectrum or leave us a review on iTunes

BYEEEEE!