Eelectronic arts

Star wars: Galaxy of Heroes

A card collectible game in star wars universe

Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes is a mobile card collectible RPG game(CCG) developed by Capital Games and published by Electronic Arts. It was formally released on November 24, 2015. and its player base has now reached nearly 80 million. When I joined Capital games, the game was still under soft launched. A decision had been made pivoting the gameplay to a different style. I helped with the pivoting process in order to have the smooth official release. I’m going to briefly show some features I worked on for this project

Platform: IOS, Android

The Users : CCG players, Star wars fans

Team Size : 80+ people

My Role: UXUI designer

SPACESHIP FEATURE

Summary

Ship battles were added on November 22, 2016. This feature allows players to control various spaceships through their captains and pilots.The ships are controlled and played similarly to the main game, with the addition of an unassailable capital ship that offers leadership bonuses, special abilities, and additional attacks.

My Role

As a Sr. UXUI designer, I worked with another UI artist who mostly implemented assets for the unity engine. In the concept stage , I was working with the creative director, the producer and game designers to determine the feature structure specs and wireframe. We met with stakeholders, included the Vice president, product managers and art director once a week to review our progress. I also created UI mockups and the assets in this feature. I had to coordinate with engineers and tech artists to control feature costs and ensure that we would be able to hit our release date.

Challenges

Although the gameplay is similar to character battlies, there are some additional attacks that we were introduced. How to flow the game well from existing feature into ship feature, let user feel its not only an add-on feature. The space ship feature is a level up for advanced players and also for unlockable for entry level players. The following challenges are –

Star wars’ ships came with variable size and structure
Need to tighten with existing Star Wars character battle HUD display
How to flow the space battle mechanic in the battle sequence
Reinforcement ships arrangement
Capital ship needs unique display
Ship crews display in ship detail screen(character, droid and weapon)

User Goal for Ship Feature

Players need to able to access all different kinds ship battle. PvE, PvP or daily challenges
Players need to able to upgrade their ships and the crew members (characters)
Players need to able to gain currencies and shards by attending ship battles
Players needs to able to access to fleet store to purchase needed items

The Solution

Create a ship room sub-menu area. It’s easier to arrange ship related battles and challenges inside of this sub-menu
Create multiple ship inventory entries. The ship inventory button was added to both home screen and ship room. Players can easily access to upgrade/unlock the ships whether they are ready for the battle or just managing their ships
Ship detail screen character level and ship are inter-connected If users found the character doesn’t have enough XP. Players can go back and forward between character detail and ship detail to level up to prepare for the ship battle

Ship Detail Screen concepts

Here are two design wire concepts that I presented to stakeholders. The challenges involved in making the ship detail screen is that the ships are different sizes. Unlike characters, some are wide, some are tall, and some are huge. Most of ships carried 1-2 character crews. Few ships carried 4 characters plus a droid. Since our game is a CCG, the users would like to see more information on the screen compared to casual game players. We determined how to fit the information into the screen area and also display which characters would be on the ship using limited space.

UI Elements in Ship Feature

Ship Detail

Ship Pre-Select & Ship Battle

In Game Screenshot

Here are some of UI screenshot from ship inventory and ship challenge series screen

Summary

It’s a functionality for searching guild. The purpose of this feature is for players to search for a guild they want to join. In the past, Players could only create and join a guild from a pre-generated list. With this feature, players can search by name, filter by ally and raid tier.

Battle Combate HUD

Battle combat HUD system was the first feature I was working on. There are many displays involved to indicate the statuses of enemies and alliances. Since mobile games have limited screen space, there are a maximum of 10 characters on the screen. How to make sure it’s not overly crowed and confuse the player is the key of this design.