Druns is a pixel art game with a post-apocalyptic theme with a gameplay based on Flappy Bird (one single finger tap action). It sounded pretty basic and, in general, nothing too complicated —after some days studying the game I must say that I was so wrong.

The project was in early-stage when we arrived, most of the assets were bought from many artists and sources over the internet. The game had a lack of personality due to this, however the most important thing that pops into my head was that we didn't know our audience.

There were too many questions to be answered before I started to create the UI:

👉 Who is the audience?
👉 Do we know our SWOT?
👉 Which is our “Wow! moment”? Do we have one?
👉 How are we validating our assumptions about new features? How much budget do we have to do this? For how long?
👉 Do we have Quick Wins?
👉 Is our developing process suitable to be improved?

👉 Well, none of them were answered so it was the perfect scenario for doing some research and find out the North Star of the game.

The following weeks I spent my time consuming articles, taking courses online in Learning (LinkedIn), and Youtube content related to this (you can find awesome content and free, for real). I started documenting UX methodologies in Notion for further references for the team.

One of the most valuable lectures I had was creating action items from the book Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean User Research. It has a lot of great examples, in addition, it explains possible scenarios, happy and sad paths to experiment and get the data you need to.

To be honest, I felt kind of scared due to my lack of experience working on this kind of project however, you don't really finish learning about any subject. That's the fun and interesting part of my job.

In order to generate the UI, I tried (unsuccessfully) Photoshop, Illustrator, and Affinity Photo with no luck. I was shocked because it was a new way to design interfaces. Eventually, I found the best software (open source) for the job, Aseprite, and trumps in the sky started to chime.

Given the fact that we are a small group of guys creating a game, all of us needed to play the role of UX researcher. I documented and shared with the team resources, activities, action items, and lastly, I ran some workshops for explaining the objective and what we could expect from our findings.

In small companies, this is a common activity I usually do to push the boundaries about what we can do looking for quick wins or defining/improving processes.

Because of that, I prepared a questionnaire to run a user’s feedback campaign, gather all the possible data, and analyzing it to discover possible solutions and find frictions.

The game is still in development, this is an early design for HUD (Head Up Display) considering the following aspects:

👉 Adaptative design
👉 Modularity
👉 Accessibility

👉 Keep elements reachable (thumb zone)

Lobby (main screen)

Screens for App Stores