Browse Tag

best-practice

Congratulations, you’ve launched your first live game! Now the real work begins.

The transition from “Development” to “LiveOps” can be violent. You are moving from a world of assumptions to a world of hard truths.

Usually what happens is that your first 48h are pure chaos, fighting fires, fixing P0’s and getting the game stable. And then, the first month is a chaotic firehose of data, bugs, and player sentiment. The studios that win aren’t the ones with the perfect launch; they are the ones with the best reaction to an imperfect one.

Here is what you need to watch out for and how to operationalize that early feedback:
The FTUE cliff locations: Don’t just look at D1 Retention. Look at the specific step where players quit. If 20% of users drop off at “Mission 3,” you don’t have a retention problem; you have a difficulty spike or a UI bug.
Fix this immediately.

Triangulate sentiment vs. behavior: Players will scream that “progression is too slow.” Before you buff rewards, look at the data. Are they actually quitting? Or are they grinding happily while complaining?
Fix the “feel,” but trust the action.

The Economy faucet check: Watch your currency inflows vs. outflows like a hawk. If players are hoarding currency (not spending), your sinks are unappealing. If they are broke (starved), your pacing is too harsh.
Early economy exploits must be patched in hours, not days.

Identify the outliers: Set up automated alerts for statistical anomalies. If one player earns 10x the average gold in an hour, they haven’t “played well”—they’ve found a dupe or an exploit.
Catching this early saves you from a database rollback.

The meta velocity: Players will solve your game 100x faster than you expected. Watch the “Time to Cap” for your content.
If players are consuming a month’s worth of content in 3 days, you need to accelerate your “Evergreen” systems or activate a “slow-down” event immediately.

Technical friction logs: A player saying “it’s laggy” is noise. Look at your server-side logs for “failed handshakes,” “high latency spikes,” or “matchmaking timeouts.”
These invisible technical frustrations kill retention faster than bad game design.

Be ready to tear down your roadmap: The roadmap you wrote pre-launch is now a hypothesis. If players love a feature you thought was minor, pivot your team to support it. If they hate your “headline feature,” cut your losses.
The LiveOps roadmap must be fluid.

The launch window is a test of your team’s agility.
Listen to the data, respect the player’s time, and be willing to change everything you thought you knew.

26 Essential books for Game Design, Development, Business and Leadership

Here are some of my favourite books, all about Game Dev:

Game Design:

Development:

Game Leadership:

LiveOps:

Business:

Community:

UI Components Handbook

No matter what kind of UI component you’re working on, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. To make your work easier and shorten research time, the folks at UI Guideline analyzed some of the most popular design systems and UI libraries to standardize the design and code of more than 40 UI components. The result is the UI Components Handbook.

For each component, the handbook gives you an overview of real-world examples, anatomy, grouping, and properties of the component. The cherry on top is a ready-to-use Figma component that includes all the best practices and the ready-to-use HTML code that you can use as a starting point to code and style your own component.

https://www.uiguideline.com/components

Better Authentication UX

Authentication is a tricky subject; if done wrong, it can break a user experience. There are password rules that make it hard to remember the password we chose and well-meant security questions that might even lock us out of our accounts instead of providing an extra layer of security. And nobody likes to identify crosswalks and fire hydrants either. So how can we fix the authentication UX for good?

That’s exactly the question that Jared Spool explores in his presentation “Fixing The Failures of the Authentication UX.” He explains how to make authentication design a priority in your experience architecture and where the real risks are so that you can best protect your users — without frustrating them.

Fighting Deceptive Patterns

Deceptive patterns can be hard to spot, but they are all around us: Social media apps forcing us to connect our phone numbers, “free trials” that automatically turn into paid services without a reminder, or prompts where the “no” option is well-hidden. The list could go on. Luckily, there are some great initiatives out there that take a stand against Deceptive patterns.

One of them is the Dark Patterns Tip Line. To raise awareness of the harm that manipulative design can cause, it crowdsources stories of digital manipulation. The goal is to help policymakers and enforcers hold companies accountable for their practices. So whenever you come across a dark pattern, don’t hesitate to report it to the tip line.

The hall of shame by Deceptive Design also collects stories from users who had to deal with deceptive patterns. The same goes for the Dark Pattern Detection Project. Their goal is to develop an open-source, AI-based text analysis tool that detects deceptive patterns automatically and redesigns them in a personalized manner for the respective customers.

The Best UX Research Methods in a Pinch

Jordan Bowman wrote a great post to help you find the right UX research method for your project. In “The Best UX Research Methods in a Pinch,” he takes a closer look at six methods that don’t take much time or money but give you the insights you need, quickly and effectively.

https://uxtools.co/blog/best-ux-research-methods-in-a-pinch/

Usability Heuristics Frameworks

For many UX designers, Jakob Nielsen’s “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design” is the go-to evaluation approach. However, sometimes you might discover discussion-worthy user experience problems that don’t fit the mold.

Michael Kritsch was in the same situation and started searching for alternative usability heuristics frameworks. This led him to the question: How to choose the appropriate method? To help you make an informed decision, Michael explored, categorized, and standardized ten heuristics. He summarized his findings in a comprehensive article.

https://uxdesign.cc/usability-heuristic-frameworks-which-one-is-right-for-you-1962387b7cc

The Design Systems Guide

Getting a design system right is hard. There are so many different types of design systems and so many ways of setting up one and maintaining it over time. Fortunately, there is plenty of incredible resources all around design systems. But where do you even start? What would be a good process to use to make sure that your efforts don’t hit the wall of tough deadlines and final tweaks? The Design System Guide, kindly released by Romina Kavcic, has got your back. The guide is a very comprehensive interactive book on the foundations of design systems, design metrics, design tokens, checklists, and handy resources for managing design systems.

https://thedesignsystem.guide/