If you’ve read The Goal, or have heard of the Theory of Constraints, then this might feel familiar. It explores the question: how can a design team speed up game development throughput?
The simple answer is to come up with faster design hand-offs. However, if you look at the diagram below, you notice that the design team also needs to reduce rejections (i.e. anything that involves sending a work back in the game development assembly line). The design team needs to reject less features from the clients, and the programmers need to reject less features from the designers.
Game designers work with project stakeholders (e.g. game publishers) to determine what features go to an upcoming release. The UI/UX design team (me) determines if those features will make a negative impact on users. If they don’t, the feature gets designed then handed off to developers. If the developers have questions about interactions, assets, or UI states then they go back to the UI/UX design team for clarification and amendments.
If a feature takes 2 days to be defined in game design, then I reject it, then that’s 2 days lost for the entire system. If a developer takes a day to clarify UI/UX hand-offs, then that’s a day lost in game development. No matter how fast an individual game designer, UI/UX designer, or game developer is, their work is only as fast as the slowest part of the game development system for the end user.
After analyzing our game development system, I was able to come up with some solutions that eventually became adopted by the rest of the company.
Moving to Figma was an obvious choice because it’s a better product than XD (e.g. no file syncing, better interaction design, real-time updates). Here’s a few reasons why:
Another I did was to take up as much templating work away from the developer. I decided to use Unity (a developer tool) and load as much of my nearly-completed and completed designs there as game files. Since the game file are already there, developers did not have to waste time mapping together design documentation and their resultant game files. This also shortened feedback loops when there were issues with nearly-completed designs since I could revise them on the spot without having to meet with developers.