Mobile UX Design for Cockatrice Desktop (digital card game platform)
Cockatrice exists only on desktop environments (Mac, Windows, Linux), and with the rise of mobile devices, many players want to also play on their phones and tablets. Due to the manual nature of game object interaction on Cockatrice (it's trying to mimic paper card interaction), taking this experience to mobile is not a trivial task. The screens shown here are my first attempt as taking the complex feature set of the desktop version and translating it to a phone screen, all without forcing the developers to rebuild the entire backend server sync architecture. An important note here is, being an open source, volunteer project, you cannot hoist that amount of work onto the team without extensive prior agreement by said team to undertake such a rebuild. While a UX designer's job is to deliver the best experience possible to the user, in a case like this, that designer must also consider the developers' time, skill, and interest, in starting a massive upgrade that may not see actual users for years. I did/am doing my best to deliver a familiar yet optimized experience to the user while working within the mentioned constraints.
These screens try to incorporate the most important parts of the gameplay experience: cards on the table, cards in your hand, life totals, and a phase indicator. Other secondary elements are hidden in tabs and pull/swipe menus.
One of the biggest issues with converting Cockatrice to a mobile app is the large amount of right-click menus and application menus within its overall interaction design. Due to the depth and complexity of this project, UX design on it has been slow, but the task is welcome (I'm a user of Cockatrice so it's in my interest to overcome this design challenge).
