Indie Game UX Evaluation

GUR/UX Case Study – 2021

The Project

Our team performed a User Experience Evaluation on the Indie Game “A Witch’s Tale” (available on Itch.io). Our team conducted usability testing with a group of participants in order to better understand user perception of the game and to construct a heuristic evaluation based on important components of current game design. Our team was able to identify several areas for development in the game and highlight them with ideas for improvement.

The Plan

  1. To gain a deeper understanding of the game, each team member undertakes a personal ‘play-through’ session, first identifying any obvious areas of user frustration.
  2. Create a research script that will allow the team to take notes on the themes identified throughout the personal play-throughs.
  3. Conduct several usability tests with participants, using a “think-aloud” approach to their play-through. Gather any notes on player frustrations and suggestions made during the research.
  1. Combine all team notes and emphasize any important pain points observed across numerous users.
  2. Present your findings to the class and recommend solutions for developers to employ to improve the User Experience of their game.

My Role

My involvement in this project was to create and implement the research methodologies that our team planned to use to gather significant pain points. I was in charge of creating the research script, as well as devising questions to find changes offered by our participants. Finally, during the presentation stage, I highlighted three of the high-level insights our team was able to gather from participant play-throughs.

Research Discoveries

  • Discovered a major pain point for players to swap-out their primary attack, where the current process forced players to “run-and-hide” to do so. We suggest a new approach with specific key-bindings for different attacks.
  • Discovered there was a lack of feedback representing damage taken, where players were unaware of how much damage they took before it was too late. We suggest a Ui HUD improvement with greater indication of damage against players.
  • Discovered there was a lack of objectives & goals provided to players, leading to an immediate confusion at the start of the game. We suggest that developers implement a better tutorial section at the start, as well develop a small storyline to drive gameplay.
  • Discovered that the game provides no introduction to player controls, and players must search to find how to play the game. Our team suggests that the game automatically display character controls at the start of the game for players to quickly identify.
  • Discovered that the in-game rewards did not match with the challenges the players faced, where harder rounds would result in less reward from an easier round. We suggest the game employ a new method of calculating player rewards after each battle round.
  • Discovered some visual design elements of the game confused players, as they would stand out and draw player focus without a specific purpose to do so. We suggest the games visual elements be adjusted to ensure player focus is not pulled away for unnecessary reasons.

Final Presentation

Our team presented our findings to our peers for feedback on research methods, pain-point identification, and presentation adjustments. The project our team completed was excellent practice for executing Game User Research in the video game industry. We were overall happy with the areas of improvement identified during this study, and believe the suggestions we provided would enhance the current UX of A Witch’s Tale.

Platforms Used

  • Discord
  • Google Slides
  • Zoom